Photo: Speech by Dr. Yang Yi, General Manager of Socionext China (1)?
The history of automobile development is a history of changes in people's travel and lifestyle.
The continuous innovation and breakthrough of science and technology constantly promote the continuous iteration, evolution and upgrading of the automobile industry; The automobile industry has promoted profound changes in cities, society, energy and other industries, as well as people's travel and lifestyle. The wave of intelligence ignited the third revolution of automobile industry and people's travel mode.
The automobile industry is evolving from the traditional automobile era to the automatic driving era, and technologies such as automobile electrification, intelligence and networking are rapidly being deployed. The government and capital are also deeply involved. Both of them have played a role in promoting the development of autonomous driving to a certain extent.
Photo: Speech by Dr. Yang Yi, General Manager of Socionext China (II)
The wave of intelligence ignited the third revolution of automobile industry and people's travel mode.
The automobile industry is evolving from the traditional automobile era to the automatic driving era, and technologies such as automobile electrification, intelligence and networking are rapidly being deployed. The government and capital are also deeply involved. Both of them have played a role in promoting the development of autonomous driving to a certain extent.
Figure: Automatic driving classification: L 1~L5
The development trend of automobile industry: the reform of E/E architecture
The future automotive electronic and electrical architecture (E/E) is developing from distributed ECU architecture to domain computing and centralized computing. More humanized cockpit experience, more sensors with higher accuracy, and wider communication requirements all require computing chips with stronger computing power. This puts forward higher requirements for the integration of computing platform and SOC in automobile. It can be seen that the computing SoC platform has become the core of AD/ADAS and intelligent cockpit.
Figure: Development of Automotive Electronic and Electrical Architecture (E/E)
The first change is the transformation of E/E architecture.
In the traditional distributed architecture, there is no concept of E/E architecture, and the system is maintained by hundreds of ECU that need to be optimized separately. However, with the increasing digitalization of automobile control and the increasing interconnection of ECU, the whole system is defined by domain architecture.
Domain architecture allows effective data transmission within the domain, reducing the wiring harness, but because it may be scattered in different areas of the vehicle, partition architecture is adopted to achieve a more efficient architecture. In the regional architecture, each region contains a part called regional controller (or regional gateway), which controls data communication, high-load process and the control of the whole system in the central vehicle computer.
With these changes in E/E architecture, the requirements for higher-performance semiconductor SoC are getting higher and higher, among which the on-board computer requires CPU performance to exceed 100kDMIPS and cognitive performance to exceed100 tps.
Figure: the transformation of E/E architecture?
Socionext's target market segment (MS) mainly includes sensor edge, cockpit HMI and automobile computing. Sensing edge is a sensing system to detect the external state of automobile, and Socionext focuses on the field of lidar. Cockpit HMI is one of the automobile display systems in the human-computer interaction interface, and Socionext focuses on the display controller. Automotive computing is an autonomous driving /ADAS domain architecture and partition architecture system, and Socionext focuses on surround vision monitoring and partition/HP computing.
Figure: Socionext's target market and market segments in the automotive field.
In addition to more than 20 years' experience in the automotive market, Socionext has a variety of technical know-how in system development, such as low power consumption, large-scale, high-speed and high-performance design, and its fields include: consumers, networks, data centers and industrial markets. In order to adapt to the changes in the CASE era, Socionext has the ability to evolve the existing development model of automobile SoC, which is mainly based on old technology, into a new model with advanced technology as its flagship.
Photo: Dr. Yang Yi Bo explained the advantages of Socionext in the automotive field.
Secondly, the SoC design technology of Socionext.
In the 5G, data center and automobile markets that need advanced SoC, due to the increase of required specifications (such as computing and network), the SoC architecture has been changed to a similar architecture configuration. As an independent semiconductor company, Socionext has a broader vision for market applications, and can provide a more competitive SoC by taking advantage of its own advantages, instead of vertically integrating semiconductor components required for specific products in the model. In addition, through a flexible IP lineup, including IP from other companies, we can quickly respond to customer needs and develop flexible ASIC using basic SoC architecture technology.
With rich experience in SoC design, Soiconext can provide a highly competitive SoC for the automobile market.
Figure: Socionext SoC design technology
Socionext advanced technology initiative: Traditionally, in order to ensure the quality of automobiles, the backward technology is usually used to develop automotive semiconductors. In recent years, due to the changes of electric vehicles and E/E architecture, it is very important to realize large-scale, high-performance and low-power advanced technologies in the field of automobiles that need computing resources. Other advanced technologies are also needed when there is demand in the market. This trend is very obvious in the field of AD/ADAS. Although Socionext is currently developing a 5nm SoC, it needs advanced 3nm process development in the future.
Figure: Socionext advanced technology leading the global automobile market.
Figure: Socionext automotive product technology
The advanced technology of Socionext can be divided into three categories: First, hardware technology, providing SoC architecture, system integration and IP technology, and developing Spec in ASIC. The second is software technology. Socionext has software engineers and technology from low level to high level. Finally, automobile quality assurance, the rich development experience of Socionext team supports the product to conform to ISO26262/ISO2 1434 functional safety system.
Through these three elements, Socionext can provide an automobile-quality SoC solution using hardware and software technologies. Socionext provides automotive quality hardware and software technology for SoC solutions to meet customer needs.
Figure: advanced technology of Socionext?
Socionext ensures higher quality and reliability of automobiles through the following links:
Design strategy (DFM/DFT)
Test strategy
Reliability test (AEC-Q 100)
Production process control (automobile service package)
Functional safety system (ISO26262)
File (PPAP)
Customer Complaints (8D Report)
Figure: Socionext custom car SoC
Socionext can be used to customize the IP of SoC, and can be effectively combined with the IP of third parties to provide system optimization solutions for customer needs.
OMNIVIEW is a software library of surround view monitoring system, which is a technology to synthesize multiple camera images and display them from a free perspective.
For 2D graphics IP, Socionext is preparing 2D-BLT processing function, jitter/clutter display function and video capture function to control camera video input as IP of display controller.
ISP+AIIP is a high-precision image recognition IP, which uses ISP IP and AI engine to accurately reproduce images, thus achieving the best performance according to the requirements of monitoring and detection. This is the technology to realize high recognition performance of artificial intelligence engine in the future.
High-performance and high-precision analog IP is a highly reliable IP, which has been demonstrated and mass-produced in ADC/DAC.
For low-power technologies, we have technologies to suppress and control the power consumption of clock, power control, standard cells and SRAM.
Figure: Industry-leading technologies related to intellectual property rights
At the end of the speech, Dr. Yang Yi concluded that the growth of the automobile market, especially the growth of the ASIC market, provided an excellent opportunity for the sustainable development of Socionext. With strong front-end expertise, exquisite 7nm/5nm design and implementation skills and advanced in-vehicle IP, Socionext provides customers with a high-quality, high-performance customized SoC platform. In addition, with its rich knowledge in the automotive field, especially in functional safety, Socionext is in a leading position in the independent field; In addition, the rich partner ecosystem enables Socionext to expand the market scale and speed up the time to market with IP partners.
Figure: Socionext's main automobile market