Date: 30/08/2012

Automotive Electronics: Infineon gear-up to serve changing market

Automotive MCU expert Suraj Makundarajan, Global head of Embedded Software development, MCU business line, Infineon Technologies explains some of the technology trends in automotive electronics. Since he is working in this domain from past 18 years, this writer asked him how much the MCU has changed in 18 years of his career. He says "When I first started working in microcontroller, 8 bit was already a mid to high-end, all the engine was controlled by 8-bit at that time, that was only a fraction of the whole platform, compared to that, today even the basic four-wheeler engine is controlled by 32 bit processor, so I would say the performance factor for getting fuel efficiency, emission, is of atleast gone up by a factor of 10 to 15x". On the high growth of processing power of PC processors compared to MCUs, he says "because the PC is more of number crunching, in microcontroller its not number crunching (not only), it is lot of real-time events."

Infineon has strong position in most of the segments of automotive electronics, except in infotainment. Infineon MCUs are used in power train management, fuel injection, emission control and body electronics.

Some of the 32-bit MCUs from Infineon are powered by their own proprietary processor core called Tricore with six-stage pipeline architecture. Suraj claims Tricore is a powerful architecture. When I asked him how Tricore performs compared to say ARM Cortex M4, He said "M4, we are using in a industrial product called XMC4500, if we compare this and that, the performance (of Tricore based MCUs) is higher by atleast 3 to 4 times". In the area of automotive body electronics market, Infineon supplies MCUs with 16-bit core called XC2000 family. He says 16 bit is doing good in this market. Suraj says Infineon's successful 16 bit MCU family XC2000 is at par or even better than Cortex M3 in performance.

The only left over by Infineon in automotive electronics is infotainment, Suraj says "We are not their in infotainment, its a conscious strategy, as a business strategy we enable the interfaces towards infotainment, we strongly believe that (infotainment) will be converging with the mass market application not necessarily with the automotive only standard."

Extremely high-performance single processor vs multiple clustered processors all around the car: Suraj says "this type of philosophy is not new and at the same time there are complexities, this is what we call it as gateway controller, then you put a lot of complexities on the gate and the slaves have become little bit reactive. The other approach is to have a distributed system, where you have local intelligence, and then there are strong communication layer, these are usually CAN, flexray, and also Ethernet is coming up."

The scope of wireless inside a car: Today it is heavily wired, and in the wire also there are various categories, there are standard copper wires, there are other high performance cabling such as fiber optic, flexray for instance, this is needed for various applications. Because wherever there is lot of reliability and other standards are needed, today the wire and the redundancy is important, where as wireless is gradually finding its way, I wouldn't say completely wireless, there are also wireless applications such as GPS and stuff like that used in Infotainment applications"

Power bus standard in cars: According to Suraj: 48 Volts going to become normal in gasoline and diesel vehicles, its a trade-off. In electric vehicles there are various types of batteries emerging such as fuel cells, these will redefine a lot. With high end cars having 50 and even 80 microcontrollers inside a car there is growing power consumption. To address the growing power consumption and the fuel cells coming into play a role, each OEM will have a different strategy.

Suraj finds Hybrid is a gradual step towards affordability and efficiency. Prevailing technologies support the development of hybrids faster. Infineon has devices for Hybrid cars.

Suraj take on Indian auto market: Indian OEMs are getting more and more interested in electric offerings. Infineon has leading market share in power train market of Indian automotive electronics. Due to growing demand of two wheeler in tier2 and rural market of India, innovation is happening at fast pace and Infineon is targeting this market. Infineon has reference design for e-bike. Suraj says Infineon's MCUs used in engine management are ahead of its nearest competitor by one year.