Connectivity and seamless integration of mobile devices as well as simple and convenient operation through touch, voice and gesture control, together with customization options in areas such as lighting, audio and seating configuration are becoming increasingly important.
Use of Artificial Intelligence and biometrics enables these features to be automated and easily transferred between vehicles. The ability to meet the individual needs and expectations of each driver is becoming increasingly important.
The car of the future will integrate a large number of different sensor technologies, including cameras, radar, LiDAR and ultrasound to enable real-time decision making, supporting the driver and enhancing comfort levels.
The processing power required to deal with the massive amounts of data generated will be delivered by complex, high-performance multi-processor System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions. These SoCs will support a range of other functions such as image & video processing as well as accelerators for deep learning. The volume of data to be handled will require very efficient, high-throughput chip architectures as well as high-performance memory interfaces. A further challenge will be to achieve highest levels of performance and integration whilst minimizing both chip size/cost and power consumption.
Meeting these conflicting challenges open new opportunities for customization, which may be the only option to achieve the required design objectives and enable the car OEMs to differentiate from their competition. There will be a move to platform-based SoC designs which can be utilized across the entire product range, with model feature-sets and differentiation being largely defined through software, enabling real-time on-line updates to be performed.
Solution SoCs will therefore become increasingly important in future Automotive applications. Socionext, as the world’s second largest fabless Solution SoC provider, is able to address the most complex of SoC design challenges, based on leading-edge semiconductor technology. With its long history of serving the Automotive market, Socionext is the ideal partner to support the full range of services expected by Automotive customers, from product specification (including Functional safety requirements), through IP support and chip implementation to complete product lifecycle management.
Think Automotive Solution SoC – Think Socionext!
