Head:The Automotive World of Tomorrow Is Brought to You by Today S EDA

1005EN-Automotive.doc

Keywords: automotive, telematics

@head:The Automotive “World of Tomorrow” Is Brought to You by Today’s EDA

@text:Where are the flying cars? My young son asked me that question the other day. He then explained, “You know, those flying cars of the future. Isn’t this the future?” He had seen pictures of futuristic cars as depicted by visionaries of the 1950s.

I explained that those futuristic cars weren’t quite here yet, but that didn’t mean that today’s cars lack some pretty cool technology. Few automotive visionaries of the past could have foreseen such marvels as the capability to “see” without headlights. Yet infrared-thermal-imaging systems do just that. They allow the driver to see beyond the glare of oncoming vehicles to avoid pedestrians or animals that cross the road at night.

Did the engineers of yesteryear envision cars being navigated via global-positioning- satellite (GPS) systems? Did they foresee theater-quality audio-visual entertainment systems inside cars? How about voice-activated communication devices that let us plug our wireless mobile phones directly into the car’s audio system? Today’s cars are indeed a marvel of electronic and mechanical engineering, thanks to the innovations wrought by the EDA and semiconductor professions.

With electronics approaching 40% of a vehicle’s cost in the next five years, is it any wonder that the automotive industry has shown interest in the tools and methodologies of the semicon community? A real challenge arises when the increase in overall electronic systems is coupled with a decrease in the automotive design cycle. That cycle sits at two years now, but it’s projected to be one year in 2010. To meet this shrinking time-to- market and related decreasing cost requirements, the auto industry has turned to the established chip-design and embedded communities for help.

Surprisingly, several EDA-related firms already have significant automotive-domain expertise. Mentor Graphics, for example, has developed automotive electronic-design technology for the last 20 years. Aside from tools for system modeling and prototyping, the company has created embedded-software applications, board-level designs, and even wiring harnesses.

This company has been providing component-level design and test tools--embedded software, printed-circuit boards (PCBs), and harnesses--to the auto industry for some time. Just recently, Mentor also has been moving up the famous “V” diagram life-cycle model to provide system-level design and test tools for vehicle network support and electrical distribution systems. Now, the company is using its expertise to provide functional design and architectural optimization. In fact, Magneti Marelli just adopted Mentor’s new mixed-signal and simulation environment, called SystemVision, in addition to other tools like ModelSim and HDL Designer. But engine-control and system-safety electronics make up only a portion of today’s automotive electronics system. The worldwide market for semiconductors in car audio, infotainment, and other driver-information/telematics systems is predicted to grow by $7 billion by 2010. That same year, FPGA and CPLD sales in automotive applications are forecasted to grow 94% from $240.3 to $449 million. These programmable chips will be used for the following applications: video processing for in-car cameras, information processing for multiple display systems from GPS to DVDs, and gateway-interface control for a variety of automotive-networking standards.

The significance of these growth numbers hasn’t been lost on the major FPGA companies. Xilinx, for example, recently announced that its automotive family of programmable devices would be expanded to include its entire line of inexpensive Spartan 3Es and its high-performance Virtex-4 line of FPGAs. Qualifying these product families to meet the numerous automotive standards is no small feat. Clearly, the task is justified by this market’s growth potential.

EDA tools and FPGAs only represent part of the automotive semiconductor market. A variety of chip vendors have been supporting the automotive sector for a long time. Consider Texas Instruments’ ARM7 family of MCUs. They’ve captured 65% of the chassis and braking market and 40% of the airbag market.

To cope with decreasing design-cycle time, IP and reuse-enabling technology also have become popular with automotive-electronic designers. Companies like Mentor, Xilinx, and TI all have IP available for automotive designs. But several new startups have entered the game as well. One of them is IPExtreme, which has partnered with Freescale to make the FlexRay automotive-communication bus-controller IP available to the market.

The “world of tomorrow” has arrived for the automotive industry--albeit sans the winged chariots. Its arrival is due in large measure to the help of the EDA and semicon community. Though I’ve highlighted just a few of the contributors, most of the other major players (e.g., Synopsys, Cadence, Altera, Analog Devices, and more) continue to expand into the growing automotive sector.