Changes in the automotive industry in recent years from the perspective of vehicle types and demand: new energy vehicles and autonomous vehicles have become popular; from the perspective of market conditions, the shortage of chips is a major problem plaguing the market; from the perspective of supply chain trends, traditional The automotive supply chain is slowly changing, and OEMs are beginning to participate in chip design; from the perspective of automotive technology, automotive electronic and electrical architectures are evolving to software-defined vehicles.

As a large-scale chip supplier in the automotive field, NXP has always been able to keenly capture these market demands, and also attaches great importance to the iteration on high-performance microprocessor products.

Recently, NXP has launched two 16nm process "real-time" processors, and the roadmap has been planned to 5nm. This means that automotive microprocessors are developing into advanced processes to meet the new demands of the changing automotive market in the future.

"Real-time" is a big demand in the era of software-defined cars

In the past 20 years, the traditional car architecture is generally connected by a single-function ECU. The wiring of the entire car is complicated and confusing. There are about 20 to 30 ECUs in small vehicles, and more than 100 ECUs in large vehicles.

However, in recent years, the automotive electronic and electrical architecture has begun to transform into the trend of domain and regionalization. In terms of domain, the main change is to integrate and upgrade the software, and integrate the functions of some ECUs into a core domain ECU; regionalization considers the merging of ECU functions in adjacent locations and simplifies the wiring harness connection.

The combination and integration of so many functions naturally puts forward higher requirements for the real-time response processing of the processor. According to Wikipedia's definition of "real-time": real-time means that each computing operation must be guaranteed to respond within a specified time (deadline), which usually refers to a relatively short period of time.

Many applications in automotive such as: domain control, zone control, safety processing, braking system, steering system, electronic stability control, traction motor control, torque control, battery management, energy consumption optimization, power conversion, on-board charging, real-time data analysis etc., all need to be built on the basis of real-time and security control, so "real-time processing" becomes more and more important.

NXP launches S32E and S32Z two 16nm real-time processors

NXP recently launched two new processor series S32Z and S32E, which meet the new requirements of the evolution of electronic and electrical architecture for processor chips. The S32Z and S32E are a new family of processors featuring the critical deterministic behavior of safety MCUs, offering outstanding gigabit speeds, multi-application isolation and memory expansion, ideal for software-defined automotive cross-domain vehicle functional safety integration.

The biggest feature of S32Z and S32E is the "real-time" function. In order to meet timing constraints, the processor core must meet performance requirements, provide fast interrupt response and provide deterministic execution. Eight Arm Cortex-R52 processor cores with splittable lockstep support are used in the S32Z and S32E series processors. meet these requirements. The Cortex-R52 processor core also supports the functional safety and hypervisor required for these secure, real-time applications.

NXP's S32Z and S32E processors are more comprehensive than existing automotive microcontrollers. Compared to competing 28nm security microcontrollers, which typically operate in the 300~400 MHz range, these two processors use a 16nm process and provide faster speeds. High and low 1GHz, has a strong competitive advantage.

A new family of processors addresses the challenges of securely integrating deterministic, high-performance real-time applications. The processor provides up to 64 MB of integrated Flash memory for large-scale over-the-air (OTA) upgrades with zero downtime, and supports LPDDR4 DRAM and Execute-in-Place (XiP) mode Flash for large applications and AUTOSAR® adaptive applications Extended memory. A communication accelerator (FlexLLCE) supporting 24 CAN interfaces and a Gigabit Ethernet switch supporting Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) seamlessly provide automotive data to the "virtual ECU", increasing efficiency and simplifying software development. The Hardware Security Engine (HSE) supports secure boot, accelerated security services, and key management.

Both processors have reached the ASIL-D functional safety level, realizing high-performance multi-tasking real-time processing without interfering with each other between multiple cores. Among them, the S32Z processor is suitable for security processing, domain control and regional control. The S32E processor is suitable for electric vehicle (xEV) control and intelligent driving.

It is also worth mentioning that the S32Z and S32E also integrate the unique network acceleration engine originally in the network processing chip.

Nowadays, many electronic and electrical components need to be controlled in electric vehicles, including motors, traditional engines, etc., among which there are multiple MCUs running, which are connected through some serial communication interfaces, and each MCU is independent. Our S32Z and S32E can provide a common software platform to integrate these traditional functions, which means that multiple independent applications can run simultaneously on the same processor chip.

In the design of NXP's S32Z and S32E, there is a very special feature called "core-to-pin" hardware virtualization, that is, each application can specify a set of hardware resources when running on a virtual processor, so that other There is no way for the application to "steal" its resources, and through this design, each function can be guaranteed to run independently.

NXP's S32 series products have good software compatibility, such as storage structure, information security, functional safety, etc. In addition, S32Z and S32E series products (including mid-end and low-end products) are also very compatible in terms of pins. This will help enable software-defined cars, reduce software integration complexity, and enhance safety.

Looking at the entire roadmap of the entire S32 real-time processor, S32Z and S32E are the first products of this new series of S32 real-time processors, which are mid-range gigabit products.

The introduction of the S32Z and S32E family of processors solidifies NXP's leadership in secure, high-performance real-time processing, complementing the S32 automotive processor portfolio to support customers in diverse end-to-end domain control and regional automotive architectures. With the wide range of uses and advantages of the S32Z and S32E processors, the world's leading OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers are able to develop new automotive architectures with different real-time processing performance requirements.