Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
Author | Haohan
Edited by | Xiaohan
Do you think today's cars are smart enough?
It is true that under the wave of the development of intelligent networked vehicles, cars have been significantly improved in terms of intelligence in recent years. On the one hand, the computing power arms race of intelligent driving is becoming increasingly fierce, on the other hand, the human-machine interaction in the cockpit field is becoming increasingly rich, and the human-human interaction configuration such as face recognition, voice interaction, and gesture interaction has gradually become the standard.
Even so, the intelligence of the car is still in a state of isolation, what is hindering the landing of high-level intelligence?
▲A high-performance computing platform equipped with a new car
First, eager for "breakthrough" smart cars
What is true intelligence for car users? Let's imagine such a scenario.
Before the rainy season rainstorms, the driver smokes in the car and opens the window to enjoy the coolest wind before the rainstorm.
When the driver extinguishes the smoke, then in order to drive in the rainstorm, it will complete the operation of closing the window, the sunroof, opening the air conditioning circulation, and even turning on the fog lights or wipers. In complex road conditions and bad weather conditions, it also brings more safety hazards to drivers and passengers.
If the vehicle recognizes the driver to extinguish the smoke, by combining the weather conditions at that time and the probability of rain, automatically complete the above operations, the whole process does not need the driver to be distracted, which may be called a real smart car.
At this time, the role played by the car, in the words of Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, is more like a "car man partner" with wisdom, temperature, safety and reliability.
▲The camera in the car determines the driver's status
However, the above scenario is actually difficult to achieve at present. According to the existing high-computing chip and perception algorithm, it is basically possible to identify the movements of the driver and occupants in the cabin, and the weather conditions can also be obtained through the vehicle's networking capabilities.
However, in current distributed electrical and electronic architectures, each control unit is controlled by a single MCU to communicate via the CAN bus. If car companies want to add a new function, they need to add a new control unit, the complexity and cost of the system will increase, and it will be difficult to support OTA upgrades.
Therefore, in order to truly realize the above application scenarios, a central centralized electrical and electronic architecture that can centrally dispatch the cockpit system, intelligent driving and MCU control unit becomes the key.
As we all know, the electronic and electrical architecture of central computing + regional control has been a recognized trend, under this architecture, not only the need for central computing to provide a smart brain, but also the original non-communication of MCU to achieve mutual communication, through complex communication protocols and intermediate layers to open up coordination, so that the executive end is also smart, united to achieve more and more personalized travel scenarios.
Therefore, if the car wants to achieve true high-level intelligence, the MCU at the region and the end is an important puzzle to finally realize the intelligence of the whole vehicle, and it must have an essential improvement in performance, so as to help the automakers truly achieve "zero into whole".
Recently, an innovative automotive chip semiconductor company from China, Xinchi Technology, has opened up the last mile to achieve vehicle intelligence, and launched a high-performance, highly reliable and high-security MCU chip, making the car turn from a "means of transportation" to a smart "autobot".
▲Central centralized electrical and electronic architecture (top), distributed electrical and electronic architecture (bottom)
Second, the industry needs high-performance MCUs to make high-order intelligence possible
On April 12, ChipCom released a new automotive MCU product, the E3 series, which is based on the ARM Cortex-R5F design, the CPU frequency can reach up to 800MHz, and adopts TSMC's 22-nanometer vehicle specification process.
At present, most of the automotive MCU chips have a CPU frequency of 100MHz, and the CPU main frequency reaches 200MHz and 300MHz MCU chips can already be recognized as high-performance MCU chips in the industry. Compared with these MCU chips, the MCU performance released by Xinchi this time has been improved several times.
▲Core Chi Technology E3 MCU chip
Sun Mingle, chief architect of Xinchi, said at the press conference that only a single 800M CPU core, if used to do BMS, can accurately monitor the status of 40 to 60 cells at the same time; if used for motor control, it can do high-precision closed-loop control of 4 motors at the same time, and if used for gateway routing, it can support real-time data exchange between 24 CANFD, 16 LIN and 2 Gigabit Ethernet at the same time.
The MCU of The core Chi has 6 such CPUs built-in, of which 4 CPUs can also be configured as dual-core lock steps or run independently.
It can be said that through the E3 series MCU, The core Chi has raised the performance standard of the industry's high-performance MCU chips by a large margin, redefining the "high performance" of MCU chips.
In addition, as a control chip, the MCU is a top priority for the whole vehicle.
Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, said that the fault tolerance rate of the vehicle-grade chip is a few hundredths of that of the consumer-grade chip, and the probability of allowing the consumption chip to be wrong in the million-chip scale is 300 to 500, and the requirements for the vehicle-grade chip are infinitely close to 0, because it involves personal safety, and a mistake may cause fatal security risks.
▲Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology
In fact, adhering to the car rules has been deeply rooted in the brand DNA of Xinchi. In the first time of its establishment, Xinchi completed the ISO26262 ASIL-D highest functional safety level process certification, and then quickly obtained AEC-Q100 reliability certification, ISO26262 functional safety product certification and national secret certification, and is the first "four-in-one" vehicle specification chip enterprise in China.
The E3 series MCU chips released this time have reached Grade 1 in the vehicle specification reliability standard AEC-Q100, and the ASIL-D level (the highest safety level in functional safety level certification) in the functional safety level to ensure the stable operation of the car.
Looking at the current car MCU chip market, there are only a few products that can meet these two standards in the world, and for The Core Chi, this is also a mountain that is difficult for other opponents to overcome.
It is understood that if you want to pass the ASIL-B level of product function certification, it generally means to increase the cycle by 30%, and if you want to reach the ASIL-D level of product function certification, it means to increase the cycle of nearly doubling. The difficulty behind it can be imagined.
In addition, the Singh E3 also has a wide range of application scenarios, which can be applied to BMS, brake control, control-by-wire chassis, ADAS, HUD, LCD instrumentation and other fields.
Taking the most important battery safety in smart electric vehicles as an example, the performance of most of the MCU in most BMS (battery management systems) is generally weak, and it is impossible to detect each cell, only sampling and sampling, and the overall efficiency is not high. If a high-performance MCU is used, it can quickly monitor and feedback each cell, predict the risk of thermal runaway in advance, and improve the safety of the battery and the whole vehicle.
It is reported that the core Chi E3 series MCU chips are expected to achieve mass production in the third quarter of this year. In the context of tight supply in the global semiconductor industry, The MCU of The Core Chi can be said to have ridden the wave, bringing more imagination space to the vehicle intelligence.
▲Core Chi Technology E3 MCU chip
Third, covering the backbone architecture of intelligent vehicles, Xinchi has embarked on a different innovation road
In the fierce competition of the chip track, the core Chi has always been a special existence, compared to other chip companies simply focus on cockpit chips, car control chips or automatic driving chips and other subdivision tracks, the core Chi initially chose a road that few people take - a comprehensive chip solution for the future vehicle electronic and electrical architecture.
With the release of the E3 series MCU chips, Singchi has formed four product matrices of intelligent cockpit, automatic driving, central gateway and high-performance MCUs, covering the most core application areas of smart cars.
On the day of the press conference, Sing Chi also released the future-oriented "Central Computing Architecture SCCA 1.0", which can not only support safe and reliable task deployment, but more importantly, help car companies to expand flexibly systems.
▲4 series of core chi products
Full-scene and platform-based is the core logic of The core research and development of Xinchi all along, and the direct benefit brought by this logic is superimposed empowerment and light loading. It can be efficiently and jointly developed with customers, open up every application scenario, and finally realize the intelligence of the whole vehicle.
It is understood that in terms of research and development, the various series of products of Xinchi adopt platform design, and the reuse rate of software and hardware of the four products of cockpit, automatic driving, gateway and MCU reaches more than 60%, which can greatly improve the efficiency of research and development, realize resource reuse, and save cost and time.
Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, said that the platform-based through design not only greatly reduces the cost of research and development and time investment, but also rapidly improves the supply chain elasticity of the depot and alleviates the risk of "lack of core". This can actually be confirmed by Tesla's sales performance under the lack of core in 2021.
According to Tesla's financial report in the second quarter of 2021, it still achieved an increase in production capacity in the global core shortage tide.
The main reason behind this is that Tesla's electrical and firmware team was designing, developing, and verifying new MCUs, and upgrading the vehicle's electronic and electrical architecture, reducing the amount of wiring harnesses and chips, and through further integration, to a certain extent, the impact of chip shortage was avoided. This is also a core advantage of Sing Chi in the future supply chain security.
There is a phenomenon worth noting, although the track of automotive chips is becoming increasingly crowded, but there are very few experiences in mass production of complete car chip.
The R&D team led by Qiu Yujing, CEO of Xinchi Technology, is one of the few integrated teams in China with experience in mass production of large-scale vehicle specification chips, and also brings together talents from the field of automotive electronic and electrical architecture and the field of consumer electronics.
In terms of hardware design and software development, we have a more thorough understanding of the needs of domestic users, so as to create more suitable for the Chinese market and Chinese users of automotive chip products.
▲Qiu Yujing, CEO of Xinchi Technology
Qiu Yujing once mentioned in an interview: "From the first day of its establishment, The chip intelligence of a single point is not aimed at, we see only the future application scenarios of intelligent cars, which is an inseparable and complete aspect." "With the gradual landing of the four major product series, it can be said that Xinchi has embarked on a different path of innovation.
Behind the rapid development of Xinchi Technology, we have also seen the persistence and breakthrough of Chinese automakers, steady and solid at every step on the slow track of the car rules chip, and dare to break the shackles, empower the future intelligent travel with innovative business layout, and truly help the new era of China's intelligent cars to gradually enter a better state.