For all the talk and activity around electric vehicles, the number of pure-electric and plug-in hybrid cars represented barely 1 percent of the 17 million cars and light trucks sold in the United States last year.

But sales shouldn’t be seen as the only guide when assessing a global EV market where semiconductor companies hope to sell automotive chips. After all, car OEMs around the globe are investing billions of dollars into electric technologies to meet increasingly tougher emission rules.

Global momentum for vehicle electrification has motivated NXP Semiconductors to launch on Tuesday (Feb. 20th) its GreenBox development platform.

Shift from Power to Arm

With GreenBox, “Car OEMs can start developing new hybrid and electric vehicle applications on NXP’s S32 automotive processing multicore platform,” noted Ray Cornyn, vice president and general manager for NXP's vehicle dynamics and safety product line. With the Greenbox launch, NXP is officially shifting its EV and hybrid EV development platform from Power architecture to Arm Cortex technology.

Together with NXP’s BlueBox 2.0 platform (also based on S32), a development platform for the brain of highly automated vehicles, NXP is introducing its Arm portfolio “from top to bottom” to be designed into vehicles, noted Cornyn, “ranging from high-end infotainment ADAS systems to more deeply embedded automotive applications.”

Asked what sort of app development is expected on the GreenBox platform, Cornyn noted, “You can develop pretty amazing stuff” — such as applications that can boost overall energy efficiency in route planning.

For example, a designer can create a piece of software that takes advantage of specific route knowledge — when an HEV needs to drive a long uphill road, for example — to do battery management more effectively, as well as transmission control and energy planning for an internal combustion engine.

Hypervisor

Having an S32-based automotive processing platform — designed for a whole vehicle — lets OEMs and tier ones maximize the re-use of codes, software and common capabilities across vehicle domains, applications and SoCs. “You can use Arm’s new hypervisor architecture to isolate energy management from transmission control, for example,” explained Cornyn.

NXP’s GreenBox Vehicle Electrification Development Platform meets with “high performance and memory requirements for tomorrow’s HEV/EV applications,” the company claimed.

In a keynote address at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) last week in San Francisco, Yukihiro Kato, senior executive director at Denso Corp., told the audience that the automotive industry is in a period of “once-in-a-century transformation.” Drastic changes include efficient driving enabled by EVs, connected vehicles and highly automated vehicles.

In that context, the EV, regardless of its slow progress on the market, is crucial, Kato noted. To advance the electrification of vehicles, one must “downsize automotive inverter by increasing power density,” Kato said. Typically, that means the use of Silicon Carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN), or insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) technology to improve power conversion efficiency.

Asked what NXP is doing in this context, Cornyn acknowledged that that’s a domain where companies like Infineon excel. They offer what “muscle EVs need,” he said, while “we provide [the] ’intelligence’ EVs can use.” For NXP’s EV customers, NXP works with Fuji Electric as a supplier of IGBT. NXP is also currently negotiating with a potential partner to supply SiC, Cornyn explained.

Autonomous vehicles and EVs/HEVs will eventually share a lot of smarts and intelligence. Information collected by autonomous cars, for example, will be used by an EV’s vehicle control unit — start, stop and steer — so it can calculate the juice it needs to complete an energy-efficient journey, said Cornyn. NXP believes its common, S32-based BlueBox and GreenBox platform will enable that vision.

By: DocMemory
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