Since the sales of new energy vehicles in China exceeded 500,000 in 2016, and China became the world's largest new energy vehicle market, companies in the upstream and downstream supply chains of automobiles in various countries have successively strengthened their presence in China. Renesas Electronics also attaches great importance to the Chinese auto market, and can provide a considerable product portfolio for the Chinese market.

Recently, Renesas Electronics shared its overall layout, industrial strategy and main development direction in the field of automotive electronics. In the company's sharing, we saw the evolution of car architecture, the autonomous vehicle/new energy vehicle track, and Renesas' complete set of solutions for cars. Finally, Renesas also revealed its attitude towards SiC and GaN products.
Evolution of Global Automotive Electronics Architecture

The automobile industry will increasingly gather in the four directions of networking, autonomous driving/intelligence, sharing, and electronics. With the continuous extension of automotive electronics technology, the value definition relationship of traditional cars has changed. Previously, the main value of automobiles came from traditional components, such as hardware products such as engines and gearboxes, but now the new concept in the automotive market is "software-defined cars", which originate from new ideas and new evolutions of automotive electronic architecture.

Changes in the automotive electronic architecture involve domain control and central computing units. The electronic architecture changes brought about by these two have been frequently mentioned by OEMs more than ten years ago. But until recent years, with the rapid development of the automotive electrification industry, the automotive electronics architecture has not really changed in the Chinese market.

In the past, it was mainly based on the distributed automotive electronic architecture. Many small ECUs (electronic control units) were scattered in every corner of the car. A high-end model may have hundreds of ECUs. The distributed architecture brings great challenges to the development of automobiles, the maintenance of electronic equipment, and the optimization of automobile costs.

The new automotive electronic architecture is called domain control or Zonal. Domain control is based on applications and includes body domains and chassis domains. Zonal is based on locations and includes front domains and rear domains. Both use domain controllers to disperse peripheral The functions are concentrated in the large control unit, leaving only some small single-chip microcomputers or small actuators at the far end.

According to Zhao Mingyu, vice president of Renesas Electronics Global Automotive Electronics Division, the re of automobile architecture in China is mainly driven by new car manufacturers. They guide the new architecture into product applications, and quickly guide this architecture to traditional OEMs. "When the new car-making forces guide the new electronic architecture to their own products, it will in turn have an impact on traditional Chinese OEMs. More and more OEMs have entered the electronic architecture dominated by domain control. These new electronic architectures also Extending new application areas, including OTA applications, OTA can upgrade ECU software in the cloud in real time, which brings the demand for high data security. At the same time, the application of automatic driving or assisted driving also brings the need for big data transmission. Demand. The demand for cruising range and lightweight body of the car, in turn, also promotes the development of new electronic architecture." He said.
How to deal with the challenges of E/E electronic architecture?

Since the sales of new energy vehicles in China exceeded 500,000 in 2016, and China became the world's largest new energy vehicle market, companies in the upstream and downstream supply chains of automobiles in various countries have successively strengthened their presence in China. Renesas also attaches great importance to the Chinese auto market, and it can provide a considerable product portfolio for the Chinese market.

In terms of the new architecture of automotive electronics, Renesas can currently cover the requirements of different levels of architecture, such as providing a large computing power SoC for the central computing unit; in the domain control part, Renesas's new generation of 28nm single-chip microcomputers can cover application-oriented and location-based The definition of the differentiated domain; the terminal body of the Renesas remote actuator is composed of low-end 16-bit computers and 8-bit computers that are continuously iterated. Zhao Mingyu emphasized that based on the above product portfolio, Renesas' automotive product line can adapt to all the needs of the next-generation new E/E electronic architecture.

As the hardware plat on the E/E electronic architecture tends to be consistent, this brings the challenge of highly reusable software or IP. Only through the high reusability or scalability of software can we effectively reduce development costs and shorten the process from R&D. time to mass production.

Zhao Mingyu further explained that for the rapid development of software systems in automotive electronics, it is first necessary to confirm how the software will enter the car. "Before, the development environment defined by semiconductor companies, whether it is a compiler, a simulator or a debugger (debugger), they are all for devices rather than systems. In order to better meet the needs of the development of automotive electronics, Renesas has developed a highly The integrated software development environment, whose compiler, simulator, and debugger all run in a centralized environment, can support multi-system product development and definition."

A software team may have hundreds of development engineers, and equipping each engineer with a complete hardware system will make the cost even higher. In order to further control costs, Renesas also provides a large number of software simulation tools, including a lower-cost software simulation environment. Engineers can develop peripheral devices required by ECU based on the software simulation environment. [!--empirenews.page--]

Renesas' products can not only be used by direct customers - making Tier 1's system development more convenient, but also meet Tier 1's customers - the definition/testing needs of device functions by OEMs. "We have realized the requirement of shifting to the left in the development plan (shifting the test to the left means that the testing activities are involved in the software development process as early as possible, and more emphasis is placed on the development engineers to verify the code they write), because Tier 1 and OEMs The demand for a development environment relies more and more on the highly integrated development environment provided by Tier 2."

The high degree of reuse of software or IP is based on enough software protocol stacks. Taking R-Car products as an example, Renesas’ R-Car-based products can not only provide driver software, but also provide a large number of middleware to meet customer development needs, and ultimately bring ADAS applications, infotainment applications, domain control or smart Gateway application, as well as the application of the entire controller.

In the application scenarios of different models, such as SUVs and sedans (Class A0, Class B, and Class C), the underlying software and middle-level software between them remain unchanged, and the software reuse rate can reach more than 90%. However, due to the different electronic configuration requirements of various models, some more detailed adjustments are required on the application side. There are differences between different applications. If both the autopilot and the cockpit are based on Renesas R-Car products, many things at the bottom of them can be consistent, and the reuse of the bottom software can reach 50%-60%. In traditional control fields, such as gateways and vehicle control units, the reuse of IP can be 60%-70%. If the rapid iteration of products is considered, the supporting products are iterated from R-Car M3 to H3, and the software IP reuse rate can reach 70%-80%.

Based on the above concepts, customers can minimize development costs, speed up development progress, and achieve rapid mass production during the iterative process of product development. Zhao Mingyu commented that this is very important to the global market, especially to the Chinese market. Because the iteration cycle of automotive electronics products in the Chinese market is much higher than that in the global market, the iteration cycle of the cockpit in the European and Japanese markets is generally 4-5 years, and in China it is generally 2-2.5 years. In this process, if the software reuse is low, repeated development of the system between each plat will bring a very large cost.