Date: 20/09/2008

Microcontrollers for automotive embedded system applications

Each and every key part of today's latest car is monitored and controlled by Microcontrollers. From fuel saving to providing safety and entertainment to driver, MCUs work to provide lot of advanced features in new cars.
To withstand the harsh environment, highly reliable devices are only selected and from the vendors who have delivered hi-rel devices to leading auto customers.
As the car becoming more electrical controlled with hybrid, electric and other such non-gasoline driven technologies taking preference over gas guzzlers, the role of microcontroller to save power increases. Even in petrol and diesel driven vehicles, microcontrollers play major role in increasing mileage and controlling emissions.

It can be estimated the total automotive market for MCU devices in the range 6 billion USD in year 2007 and might be growing at 15 to 20%. Europe, Japan, US, China, India are key markets in that priority.

The best vendors of MCUs for automotive market are,

1. Renesas
2. Freescale
3. Infineon
4. Fujitsu
5. NEC
6. NXP
7. ST Microelectronics

32 and 16-bit devices are mostly used in automotives; the 8-bit is rarely used in automotives.
The features to look forward in Auto MCUs are, Number of CAN, LIN, and other master/slave communication interfaces, Processing power, device reliability, and temperature range. However feature requirement may vary slightly for engine control, body electronics and entertainment.

Another interesting development is, few companies such as Infineon and Freescale are launching MCUs exclusively for motor cycles. The key markets for these devices are India and China.

To read full report of Microcontroller market study visit: http://www.emittsolutions.com/section/market-analysis/market_analysis_microcontroller.html