Special
"Intelligence" has become an inevitable trend in the development of the automobile industry, and efficient and reliable chips provide a foundation for complex software development and application, and further provide fertile ground for the growth of intelligent vehicles.
As the world's leading high-performance semiconductor company, ADI's technologies and products are widely used in industrial, communications, automotive, healthcare, consumer electronics and other fields. Among them, the automobile is a very important application market for the company, and its automotive chips start from multiple fields and take innovative technology as the foothold to help the industry create more environmentally friendly, smarter and safer cars. Recently, Chen Sheng, senior business development manager of ADI China Product Division, was interviewed by this reporter, telling the development status of automotive chip technology and the evolution trend of the industry.
Chen Sheng, Senior Business Development Manager, ADI China Products Division
Chen Sheng pointed out that ADI's automotive chips mainly cut from three fields, the first is the field of electric drive control, mainly covering: battery management system BMS chips, including battery monitoring analog front-end chips, isolated communication bridge chips, battery PACK terminal monitoring chips, wireless BMS technology, etc.; control chips, such as position/speed magnetic detection, inverters and motor systems, etc.; power supply chips, including lamp power control, vehicle-grade power chips in the energy conversion link.
Secondly, in the intelligent cockpit of the car, ADI's technology mainly revolves around the application of cabin audio and video. In the field of audio, especially in the field of DSP sound effects, ADI has a long-term accumulation, and the related SHARC DSP and Blackfin DSP applications have created a good ecological environment for rapid iteration and development of products for the automotive industry. In addition, ADI was also the first company to propose an A2B bus solution, converting the traditional analog audio transmission into a digital audio transmission solution, and A2B has obtained more than 90% of the car manufacturers for the development of new car architectures. In the field of in-vehicle video, ADI's gigabit multimedia serial link (GMSL) technology can help car companies establish high-bandwidth, high-reliability real-time video transmission connection, GMSL technology has been widely used, has been a lot of vehicles for a long time to verify.
In addition, in the field of automotive safety, ADI's high-precision radar technology is applied to automatic driving, and ADI and partners have developed three-dimensional or even four-dimensional radar solutions, which better reflect the accuracy advantage. At the same time, in addition to the transmission of video in the cockpit, ADI's GMSL technology also supports the transmission of camera video information from autonomous driving at higher speed, higher reliability and low latency to the central computing unit in the field of automatic driving. In addition, ADI-based high-performance MEMS and IMU technologies complement GPS or Beidou positioning schemes, providing vehicles with more precise positioning and including body attitude monitoring functions.
Reporter: Under the competitive format of the crowd, how can chip companies maintain their core advantages?
Chen Sheng: First of all, we think that competition is a good thing. ADI has experienced a variety of competitions and challenges in the course of its nearly 60 years of development, and competition is a very effective means of promoting innovation and promoting the optimization of various products. ADI will continue to optimize products, innovate in various fields, compete benignly with friends, promote each other, promote the development of the entire industry, and work together to make this market bigger, do a good job, and do more innovative.
In the field of automotive semiconductors, the long-term advantages of enterprise competition include the long-term reliability, accuracy and stability of products. Taking ADI's newly released ADBMS1816 automotive battery management analog front-end chip product as an example, the biggest feature of which is that our high-voltage chip technology can ensure high reliability for a variety of harsh conditions throughout the battery monitoring process. On the other hand, accuracy, especially long-term stability, the ADBMS1816 can achieve a voltage sampling accuracy of up to 3 mV and guarantees a measurement accuracy of 3 mV from day one to decade. This high-precision, high-stability, high-reliability technology is ultimately very important for our customers to understand the operation of the battery, fully tap the potential of the battery, alarm in advance and avoid some battery safety failures.
How to better serve customers is also a key aspect. At the end of 2019, we established the ADI China Business Unit, which is able to independently define, develop products and complete final mass production based on the needs of Chinese customers. At the end of 2020, we established Airno Investment Co., Ltd., which has established its own independent legal entity in China, which is deeply localized in business operations and can more effectively solve the needs of domestic customers. The ADBMS1816 is a high-performance automotive battery management analog front-end chip developed entirely in China by ADI. Our locally designed chips will pay more attention to the needs of the Chinese market, such as starting to formulate special protection requirements for battery management under national standards, such as overcurrent, overvoltage, etc., to ensure that they meet the corresponding safety requirements of China's electric vehicles and energy storage.
In response to the product development requirements of high reliability of automotive chips, ADI China Division has also established a set of traceable and complete closed-loop automotive chip failure analysis and quality control system, which can make a rigorous analysis of the failure of any vehicle specification chip from five aspects: chip process, chip design, chip testing, chip production and after-sales tracking, and then feedback the problems found to the corresponding links, and finally provide customers with high-reliability automotive chip products.
Reporter: Security is crucial in any field, how to ensure the chip's support for information security?
Chen Sheng: Increasing automotive safety standards put forward higher requirements for the safety of automotive electronics. ADI's Battery Management System (BMS) is ASIL-D certified for functional safety in vehicles and meets the highest standards for functional safety in road vehicles set by regulators around the world.
In addition, ADI's Wireless Battery Management System (wBMS) is iso/SAE 21434 top automotive cybersecurity engineering and management certification. ADI hired terrestrial, a prestigious trusted certification laboratory, T NORD Mobility, to evaluate our internal development strategy and processes. After a very careful evaluation, our policies and processes are fully compliant with the new standard ISO/SAE 21434 CAL Level 4, and the cybersecurity safeguards meet the highest requirements.
Reporter: Many chip suppliers have systematic solutions and have led to the simplification of automotive E/E architectures. For example, if different structures are integrated through chips to achieve efficient data communication with minimal loss, has your company also launched a comprehensive solution?
Sheng Chen: The current automotive electrical/electronic (EE) architecture has a large number of electronic control units (ECUs) and a central vehicle gateway, and the system will become very complex over time. This architecture presents increasing challenges, especially design flexibility, system scalability, and bottlenecks in information communication. The consequences include the gradual development of the network harness into the third and most expensive component of the vehicle, weighing up to 50 kg and a total length of 5 km. The trend towards autonomous driving will further increase the demand for wiring harnesses, adding more ECUs, i.e. actuators and sensors. The highly efficient automotive bus becomes a very important part of the system design. In this field, ADI has made a large number of beneficial innovations and has been widely used by industry.
The Audio Bus (A2B) is an innovative technology from ADI that converts traditional analog audio transmission into a digital audio transmission solution that provides high-fidelity audio and reduces audio cabling weight by 75%, improving fuel efficiency. In addition, the A2B transceiver transmits audio, I2C control, low-speed GPIO, clock, and phantom power signals over an unshielded twisted pair, which can also reduce the total system BOM cost. In addition to making wiring simpler, A2B has more innovative applications, such as adapting to advanced audio algorithms, ensuring the independence of sound zones at different locations in the car with DSP algorithms, echo cancellation, ANC active noise reduction with microphones and amplifiers, and RNC road noise cancellation with acceleration sensors that support A2B interfaces.
In addition, identifying the needs of the new E/E architecture is a daunting challenge for engineers developing the next generation of autonomous vehicles. For example, the increasing use of video processing algorithms in self-driving cars and the use of multiple video cameras to provide higher precision event detection and driving alarms make vision systems a key foundational technology. In this trend, it is critical to select the right serializer and deserializer (SerDes) solution for ADAS systems, and ADI GMSL SerDes technology fully supports the high bandwidth, complex interconnects, and data integrity required by future automotive infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems. From the ultra-low power requirements of cameras to the broadband requirements of sensor data aggregation, GMSL SerDes' advanced link integrity and diagnostic capabilities provide reliable link performance monitoring– which is critical to the design of automotive safety systems. At the same time, the GMSL serializer and deserializer support shielded twisted pair (STP) or coaxial cable transmission up to 15 m, meeting the demanding electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) requirements of the automotive industry.
Wireless BMS is also a key innovation in addressing the bottleneck of wired communications in automotive electrical/electronic architectures, first proposed by ADI. The BMS used in electric vehicles is not only installed on the battery to manage charging and discharging, but also involves the life cycle management of the entire battery - from the battery factory, storage in the factory, in the transportation process, to the assembly of the car, and even to the battery loading and unloading after the car is discharged and the cascade utilization, etc., it needs a flexible, convenient and seamless communication method to help everyone understand the operation and health status of the entire battery in each link. The core of the wireless BMS is a highly reliable wireless connection method that ensures that the battery status can still be monitored in real time under various harsh operating conditions. Especially in recent years, with the slow popularization of power exchange technology, wireless BMS technology can better reflect its superiority. In the context of power exchange technology, the battery may not be on the car for a long time, and sometimes it will be installed or replaced. In this process, wireless BMS is well placed to get rid of the very complex battery management-related harness effects. In addition, wireless BMS can greatly reduce the weight of the wiring harness associated with battery management, thus helping to expand the range of electric vehicles.
Reporter: Which car brands has your company cooperated with? Over the years, has the demand for chips from OEMs changed? In what ways do they demand more?
Sheng Chen: ADI works closely with major automotive OEMs around the world. Nowadays, cars are becoming more and more intelligent, and intelligent cars mean that the perception ability and information processing ability of cars need to be greatly improved, and it also means that the complexity of various subsystems is also very different from the past. Therefore, high performance with high reliability and stability is a common requirement for automotive electronic chips, which is where the advantages of ADI automotive chips lie.
At the same time, the requirements of high intelligence make practitioners in the entire industry face unprecedented brainstorming, and innovation is the only way to continuously break through the limit and reach a higher level. ADI has always been adhering to the concept of innovation, constantly breaking through the shackles of existing systems and technologies, while solving the "pain points" of the industry and customers, and constantly introducing innovative technologies, such as our A2B, GMSL, wireless BMS technology, etc., all of which help customers and even the entire industry to break through the boundaries.
Taking electric vehicle manufacturers as an example, the challenge is how to cost-effectively scale their EV platforms while meeting the world's changing safety requirements. At the same time, in order to ensure maximum range per charge, the vehicle power consumption must be managed during the driving and parking of the vehicle. In addition, the echelon utilization of batteries from the production link to the final decommissioned battery, the health management of the whole life cycle, is a new market demand. ADI's wireless BMS products solve the above "pain points", respond to the hot needs of the market, and bring about a revolutionary breakthrough in battery systems from production, operation, after-sales service to management.