Semiconductor makers pursue further integration of onboard electronics.

Connected cars are a reality in 2015, moving quickly from luxury brands to midrange vehicles. In this domain, infotainment services, which include music, location and traffic updates, go hand in hand with assisted driving features such as ADAS. The increasing consumption of digital content in vehicles is spurring infotainment chipmakers to put together application processors, graphics accelerators, displays and human-machine interface or HMI on SoC solutions.

Vehicle infotainment features are progressing faster than in the past, turning cars into smartphones on wheels. Car electronics, however, has specific requisites in quality and robustness. "The automotive environment is harsher, and the requirements are tougher," said Edoardo Merli, STMicroelectronics' automotive product group marketing and application director for Greater China and South Asia. Besides this, there is the trend for connected and autonomous or semiautonomous cars that dictates an integration of infotainment and safety-related functions. "The in-vehicle system could encompass one or more SoCs while catering to specific implementations."

Apple's CarPlay, Google's Android Auto and other standards will have an impact as well. "They will be driving infotainment toward more open platforms in terms of connectivity, downloading information, and transferring or mirroring content from mobile devices to the head unit," Merli said.

The other affected areas include connectivity and throughput capability, audio and video processing, and display control functions. "Infotainment chips will require greater memory bandwidth, more physical interfaces and stronger video decoding/encoding for CarPlay and Android Auto systems," Merli said. "Apart from faster application processors, there will be a need for higher bandwidth for the internal bus connecting different hardware blocks within the SoC."

It will be imperative to have more powerful application processors to be able to collect and analyze all data from wireless networks, sensors and ADAS cameras. "We expect infotainment, ADAS, car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication functions to be integrated into one system through sensor fusion mechanisms," said Merli.

TI's automotive pitch

Texas Instruments Inc. has supplied the OMAP 5 application processors to Ford's third-generation infotainment and telematics service Sync 3. The latter's dashboard also includes the single-chip WiLink 8Q connectivity solution, which combines Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and GNSS, and the FPD-Link III SerDes, to deliver high-definition audio and video to the Sync 3 color touchscreen.

The OMAP 5 SoC is part of TI's Jacinto family of automotive processors and consists of Arm Cortex-A15 multicore CPUs and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR graphics cores. It offers 3D graphics acceleration, which creates a lifelike HMI experience and responsive dashboard display. The multicore processors are paired with TI's optimized memory interconnect technology to enable voice recognition, the hallmark of Sync.

The semiconductor company is investing in bringing automotive NFC. "TI has a long history of supporting RF technology for the car," said Dev Pradhan, TI's safety and security microcontrollers marketing director. "This will continue with our latest generation of NFC products, which are being qualified to the AEC-Q100 standard." The maker is also allocating resources for onboard wireless charging.