NXP Semiconductors has announced two new products that build on NXP’s S32 automotive platform with safe, high-performance real-time processing.
The manufacturer says the S32Z and S32E processor families "help enable the automotive industry to accelerate the integration of diverse real-time applications for domain and zonal control, safety processing and vehicle electrification that are critical to the next generation of safer and more efficient vehicles".
Developed in collaboration with partners including Robert Bosch, the S32Z processors are designed for safety processing and domain and zonal control, while the S32E line is aimed at electric vehicle (EV) control and smart actuation.
The processors will "help enable software-defined vehicles, reduce software integration complexity and enhance security and safety", NXP says.
"The automotive industry’s evolution to domain and zonal architectures is attractive to carmakers, enabling them to optimise wiring harnesses, reduce cost and weight and implement a more scalable and cost-effective, software-centric approach for developing and updating intelligent vehicles."
"This massive transformation requires new processors that offer higher performance, application isolation and memory expansion capabilities to support software-defined vehicles and future innovations," the company adds.
“We collaborated closely with NXP on the two new processor families”, said Axel Aue, VP of engineering at Bosch.
“The S32Z and S32E processors offer a performance increase of a factor of 2 compared to embedded NVM MCUs, key integration platform features and scalable memory with LPDDR4 DRAM and flash. It’s also ideal for embedded integration and allows the consolidation and isolation of vehicle functions with very high performance that previously required multiple MCUs.”
The processors have eight Arm Cortex-R52 processors cores with split-lock support that operate at up to 1GHz, and isolate independent real-time applications with “core-to-pin” hardware virtualisation.
They are available with up to 64MB of integrated flash memory for large, zero-downtime over-the-air updates and support LPDDR4 DRAM and flash expansion memory with execute-in-place mode for large applications.
Ray Cornyn, SVP/GM of vehicle control and networking solutions at NXP, says: “We offer our customers a scalable, compatible real-time roadmap that extends to 5nm technology to design the consolidated and software-defined vehicles of the future.”
