(iTers News) - Freescale Semiconductor Korea Inc. unveiled a new line of highly integrated and feature-rich, but budget-priced MCUs and other SOC solutions in what the world’s No. 2 automotive MCU maker said are all specifically designed to keep up with 4 mega trends sweeping across global car markets.

After the downfall of Lehman Brothers sparked a back-to-back chain reaction of financial meltdowns across globe in 2008, according to Yeongho Hwang, country manager with Freescale Semiconductor Korea, global car industry has been confronting what’s trending up as irreversible forces.

Geographically, the growth dynamics are shifting away from advanced economies, as emerging markets like China and India are pumping out new demand.



Growing concerns and increasingly stringent environmental regulations about car safety, energy-efficiency, and fossil fuel pollution are forcing car makers to streamline their car production platforms to churn out more affordable and eco-friendlier green cars like electric vehicles and hybrids.

Growth dynamics in shift   

That’s welcome news for chip makers, because their turn to emerging markets and safe-and eco-proof car platform will likely accelerate the use of more silicon contents into cars

Freescale estimates that the number of embedded processing silicon nodes in a car will leapfrog at an annual rate of 27% from now through 2018, for example, because car makers are turning to more powerful MCUs to control fuel injection and reduce tailpipe carbon dioxide emission.

Cars are also getting lighter and lighter to consume less fuel, opening up new market opportunities for Ethernet connectivity chip solutions.

The growing adoption of ADAS, or advanced driver assistance solution is where chip makers are betting, too, as radar and other vision technology-based surround view camera alert system are rapidly becoming the norm in the same way that airbag systems and anti-brake system are the fixture of every car.

As people are spending more time on road, cars are getting as personalized as their smart gadgets, carrying graphics-oriented car dashboard and in-vehicle infotainment system.

4 mega-trends present technical challenges   

New market opportunities are necessarily accompanying daunting technological challenges, however. At issue is how to create a scalable and cross-market chip solution platform that can address a wide range of applications markets from low-end and high-end cars.

Feature-rich and powerful, but affordable, low-cost chip solutions are what chip makers are struggling to tape out to tap into price-conscious emerging markets.

That’s where Freescale’s forte lies, as the chipmaker has a rich and well-balanced portfolio of legacy analog components as well as digital ICs.

For example, Freescale has a highly-integrated one cylinder engine control MM912xx 812 MCU that embeds a legacy S12P, or S12Xs MUC and analog SmartMOS MC33812A into one single package.

The high integration not only helps shrink PCB footprints, but also reduce BOM, or bill of material costs. This affordable chip solution is a good fit for window lifts, sunroof system, DC/BLDC motor controller, instrument clusters, and LED lighting system.

World's first ISO 26262-certified MCU 

On the top of that singe package ECU solution, Freescale is expanding its easy-to-use, highly integrated mixed signal MagniV MCU family –S12VR64, S12ZVM, and S12ZVH- to power up and control a car window lift system, BLDC motor, and instrument clusters, respectively.

Highlighting Freescale’s recent chip solution roll-outs are world first and only ISO26262-certified MCU Qoriva MPC5643L, Surround View ADAS chip solutions, and 77GHz radar solution.

The Qoriva MPC5643L 32-bit MCU is a sort of SOC solution that is built around Power PC dual-core architecture specifically designed to address ISO26262 functional safety standard certification and more stringent ASIL-D requirements.

Cramming its SafeAssure program-compliant key safety functionalities into one single silicon die, the MPC5643L zeros in on a wide range of applications from electric power steering system, to airbag to a short-and mid-range adaptive cruise control system to a vehicle dynamic and chassis control to hybrid electric vehicle inverter controllers.

Surround View ADAS solution on alert 

The Surround View ADAS chip solution is built with 4 MPC5604E MCUs for image capture and one i.MX6 CPU for data fusion to alert car drivers to watch the surrounding areas around a car via a an array of front-, side-, and rear-view cameras.

The MPC5604E MCU is specifically designed to send real-time data via Ethernet over unshielded twisted pair wiring. Its built-in i.MX6 does very video-oriented jobs like video decoding, graphics processing, and object-detection.

Built with a most advanced SiGe or silicon germanium technology, the 77GHz radar chip is a front-end radar transceiver chip solution that embeds multi-channel transmitter and receiver chips into a single die. The chip solution can be used with a wide range of system from adaptive cruise control, pre-crash protection and collision warning system with or without automatic steering and braking intervention system.

Freescale also showcased Qoriva MPC5676R dual-core engine control MCU, an airbag evaluation platform, and i.MX 6 CPU for car infotainment and graphical instrument cluster system.

The i.MX6 family is the power, high-end CPU line-up that consists of single, dual and quad-core processors.

To tap into low-end in-vehicle infotainment system market, Freescale is also lining up its Vybrid CPU family that are built around ARM Cortex A5 processor and other peripherals like Open VG GPU, 32K/32K cache memory and 1.5MByte SRAMs.

The Vybrid CPU family is a sort of connected, display-based radio and graphics processor for cluster and multi-function displays.

Photos and videos by JH Bae