At this stage, the global automotive industry is developing in four directions: intelligence, networking, electrification, and sharing. According to IHS Markit data, by 2023, the total value of automotive electronic systems will reach as high as 180 billion US dollars, and each car will use more than 500 US dollars of semiconductor devices on average. system.
New changes bring new requirements
At present, the technology and architecture of the automotive industry are undergoing a process of rapid evolution. One of the important reasons behind this phenomenon is that OEMs are increasingly aware of the lack of correlation between ECUs from different tier 1 manufacturers. They had to put in a lot of time and money to integrate it, which made integrating the ECUs an "extremely hard job".
The rapid development of connected cars and autonomous driving is changing this situation - in future designs, integrated solutions will obtain traditional distributed solutions, and hardware including ECUs and sensors will be highly integrated; automotive OEMs It will pay more attention to the innovation of customers at the interface software level and the ability to improve differentiated products for end customers.
In the field of smart cockpit, the instrument panel, infotainment system and screen display are being highly integrated, so that the content that needs to be displayed on one screen is gradually enriched. Moreover, the display sizes of different brands of models are not uniform, which puts forward relatively high requirements for the partitioned display and diversified integration of images.
This is not difficult for low-power FPGA products. Many car manufacturers are currently taking advantage of their programmable, strong parallel processing capabilities, low power consumption, and low heat dissipation to accelerate the introduction of related FPGA products and platforms.
At the same time, with the increasing trend of large-screen, multi-screen, high-definition and multi-form vehicle display. Many new cars have more than 2 screens, and some models even have 4-5 screens. With the increase in the number and size of in-vehicle displays, people have put forward new requirements for display quality, hoping to obtain higher color gamut, higher contrast ratio and so on. Especially in order to alleviate mileage anxiety, how to improve the efficiency of large-size screens and make them more power-saving will be a common issue faced by the industry in the next few years.
In-vehicle vision systems and artificial intelligence technologies are now also widely used in driver status monitoring systems (DMS) and in-cabin monitoring systems (IMS), including: monitoring driver fatigue, distraction or injury; monitoring passengers to ensure No children/pets are inadvertently locked in the car or items such as bags, cell phones and wallets are not inadvertently left in the car.
Therefore, ISP image enhancement would be one of the most promising applications. For example, FPGAs can be customized for backlight optimization of LCD screens, which are currently used in large numbers in automobiles, to improve visual effects and save energy. At the same time, in order to support in-vehicle 4K display, FPGA also provides extensive support for high-speed data processing and interfaces, including 1.5G-2.5Gbps MIPI, HDMI, DisplayPort, etc.
In the application of advanced driver assistance systems, the latest data shows that an L3-level autonomous vehicle will be equipped with at least 16 sensors of various types. Since the main processor needs to connect different sensor interfaces for data processing, and the car interface is also Real standardization has not yet been achieved, so it is also one of the new trends to use the programmable features of FPGA to aggregate/bridge different sensors, or to achieve I/O interface expansion. At the same time, considering that the development of the automotive platform may take 5-10 years, the scalability of the solution also affects the user's decision to select models.
Another area worthy of attention comes from electric vehicles, especially with the widespread use of wide-bandgap semiconductors such as silicon carbide, the accuracy of traditional DSP and even multi-core DSP control is becoming more and more difficult to meet the automotive industry's requirements for timeliness and accuracy of drive control. boost, and FPGAs are being used heavily as an alternative.
Security is also of high concern. The emergence of more and more sensors, automatic control and network connections not only brings intelligent, convenient and comfortable experience to the car, but also makes the system more vulnerable to malicious attacks. OEMs must be able to instantly detect vulnerabilities and prevent cyber-attacks, as well as electronic systems that can operate stably and securely in harsh environments. It is even more critical for semiconductor devices to add hardware security engines that can protect, detect and recover firmware from unauthorized access.
