In recent years, cars have changed their traditional mechanical characteristics and entered a new era defined by software and hardware. The evolution towards electric, connected, smart and shared cars is generating massive data that places new demands on all types of chips in the vehicle, such as MCU chips, memory chips, power chips, communication chips, sensor chips, etc. At the same time, the consumption and importance of automotive chips are also increasing exponentially. The field of automotive chips in the new era has become a huge incremental market in the semiconductor industry. Among them, memory chips that store and transmit data are becoming a more and more important part of the development of automotive intelligence.
The memory industry’s next growth area: cars
With the popularity of the electric car and the intelligent car cabin system and the rapid development of the autopilot system, the electrical architecture of the car electronics is centralized and distributed to the field of centralized rapid development, which necessarily promotes the rapid vehicle storage needs. Evolution, in the past, every eight years of the innovation cycle, storage has not been able to meet the development of the car’s electronic speed. Today, it takes less than 3 years on average to update and iterate onboard storage solutions and technologies, and storage performance and capacity are fast approaching enterprise-class storage.
As you know, car components such as central navigation, infotainment, advanced driving assistance (ADAS), digital dashboards, T-boxes, and vehicle/event recordings require extensive storage of device involvement. Previous devices equipped with storage products can be easily summarized in three aspects: Smart Networking, Smart Cockpit, and Smart Self-Driving.
Specific to each market segment: First, with the rapid improvement of vehicle Internet preload rate (T-Box/vehicle gateway), 8GB-16GB storage products tend to become the first choice of connected gateway products Users. Vehicles; Second, under the popularization and promotion of the concept of the intelligent cabin control system, through the above single simple functions such as music streaming, and air conditioning control gradually developed into a video, maps, navigation, games, entertainment, control of standby temperature, air purification), voice recognition, camera images displayed, AR projection and complex functions in the body’s comprehensive human-computer interaction platform. The corresponding storage requirements have also increased from 8GB to 16GB to 32GB / 64GB. With the landing of vehicle tie-down technology and driving in the cabin, the storage capacity required by the intelligent cabin system will increase to 128GB or 256GB in the future.
In addition, the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) is the subsystem with the highest growth in demand and development potential in the field of segmentation of current automotive functions, and also became the lane of new technologies with the greatest attention and investment from various automotive companies. The four cores of autonomous driving technology: perception, connectivity, high-precision position maps, and AI must be supported by technology and storage products.
In L0/L1 autonomous vehicles, only vehicles need to perform restricted operations according to environmental information such as ABS (Anti-lock Braking System) and ESP (Electronic Stability System), and SD shared memory /TF. The card can meet your functional needs. With the improvement of the autonomous level at the L2/L3 level of the self-driving vehicle, the requirements for the vehicle’s environment perception ability are greatly increased, which requires the design of the radar body and cameras around real-time detection equipment detection vehicle surrounding a large and complex environment, Traffic information and intelligent driving domain control passed through the car to the high-speed communication network, intelligent driving domain control will classify, store, identify, analyze and make decisions on this information and data through proprietary algorithms so that the vehicle can quickly avoid emergencies, braking, and other operations. eMMC storage or UFS pr products with higher transmission and read/write performance, larger storage capacity, faster response, and higher stability are sure to be widely used in ADAS.
Future autopilot level to L5 constant infiltration, in the process of autopilot L5 degree, data collection, persistence, feedback, randomness, scientific basis and judge connection to a large amount of storage capacity, at least after evaluating each car Once a day can be more than 5 ~ 20 terabytes TB of vehicle data are produced, a large amount of data for reliable high-speed transmission, transmission, and storage in the car. This would require the ADAS system to carry dedicated SSD vehicles as the data storage module, including the SSD BGA product, with its smaller package volume, larger storage capacity, and more powerful and faster transfer protocol capabilities, such as becomes more the favor of Tier 1 manufacturers and manufacturers, which I believe will herald the peak of development in the near future.
The new wave of “four upgrades” for cars is promoting the car storage revolution, the storage capacity of cars will quickly increase from GB level to TB level, and the capacity expansion has brought great market value potential, these have become one of the storage industries Must-haves in the multi-billion dollar market. According to BlueWeave Consulting, a market research and strategy consulting firm, the global automotive memory market (including DRAM and NAND flash memory) was worth US$3,475.3 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach US$172,506 billion. to 2028, it grew at a CAGR of 23.9% from 2022 to 2028.
At present, Micron, Samsung, Kioxia, and other international first-tier memory manufacturers still have a monopoly in the automotive memory industry and even in the entire memory industry. Micron alone controls about 55% of the automotive memory market share. , and has become the #1 player in the global automotive bearing space. However, with the reconstruction of the industrial chain through automotive intelligence and electrification, the traditional OEM+Tier1+Tier2 automotive supply chain pattern is expected to be broken. Vehicle architecture, Tier 1 manufacturers provide the car model of each function, gradually developed mainly from the factory, and mastered the core key technologies/Tier2 link, such as the cooperation of chip companies directly from the manufacturer, according to the current customer pain points and the future development trend of the whole vehicle autonomous integration design, to create a new mode of supply chain platform + ecology.
Regarding vehicle memory, OEMs are increasingly looking to work closely with memory manufacturers, especially domestic memory manufacturers, to maintain their advantages in data-driven smart vehicles. In this regard, many domestic manufacturers are making progress in this field. of high-end automotive storage, focusing on the design of automotive storage products, including eMMC, UFS, and BGA SSD. The updated set of automotive regulation storage solutions sufficiently prepares for the intelligent reformation of vehicle data in the new era.
Domestic storage main Controller manufacturers to the car specification progression in China
To create an excellent vehicle memory product, a high-performance memory controller, reliable flash particles and a special firmware algorithm are indispensable. The memory controller is also the car’s memory brain. It’s called CPU in memory. It is responsible for leadership, operation, and collaboration.
In contrast to the memory controller requirements in consumer electronics and industry, the design of memory controller chips in automotive specifications faces higher challenges. The rigorous logic design has just taken the first step of a highly reliable memory controller chip design, which after harsh conditions even reaches the chip standard for vehicle dimensions, before simulation design, FPGA verification, logic synthesis, formal verification, static time analysis, simulation, design, SV- Authentication, after CP, FT test, the proper configuration of these simulations, verification, and test links, on the one hand, can ensure the establishment of the strict mapping relationship between the requirements of customer functionalities and the implementation of the chip design, on the other hand, firmly control the design quality in the chip design link and improves the reliability and stability of the storage controller from the design source.
In addition, in the design process of the auto caliber memory controller, it is also necessary to add redundant chip logic to avoid systematic data failure and to effectively perform real-time data protection and recovery in real-time to achieve zero controller system error. This requires storage controller companies not only to have strong technical capability and technology accumulation but also to have a very deep understanding of the automotive field and storage requirements.
Grasp the SSD trend in the future
Cars are evolving towards information and intelligence. Every intelligent driving car becomes a mobile data center with a variety of data processing scenarios. In 2020, manned vehicles will generate an average of 1.5 GB of data per day, and autonomous vehicles are expected to generate more than 3.2 TB of data per day by 2025. Due to the cost of existing traffic and bandwidth, it is difficult to upload all data to the cloud, and demand for PCIe NVMe SSDs will increase significantly. Therefore, SSD is also a future-oriented microelectronic design from another large area.
Compared to previous vehicle-scale UFS or eMMC storage products, the vehicle SSD with its powerful storage performance and flexibly customizable functions comes closer to the usage scenarios of future intelligent vehicles:
- With extreme performance, SSD can handle a variety of complex multimedia applications and large amounts of autonomous driving data, providing a safer, more dynamic, and more comfortable driving experience.
- Super capacity, the expected configuration in the autonomous taxi field is 4TB. If commercial vehicle autonomous driving is commercialized in the future, it will have great growth potential in both scale and quantity, and TB SSD can handle a large amount of data. Storage and transmission requirements of intelligent vehicles, which will have great potential in application in the vehicle field.
- Virtualization, SSDs in vehicle-scale data centers support SR-IOV, allowing storage devices to connect directly to VMs, reducing CPU load on physical hosts and achieving faster speeds that approach native storage devices. A single memory resource configuration can be shared by multiple ECUs.
- Predictably Low Latency, a vehicle-scale data center SSD product specifically optimized for vehicle-based workload applications is able to meet stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and deliver low-latency performance. and various read and write workloads. Predictable low latency is a fundamental requirement for the user experience and a guarantee for the safety of autonomous vehicles.
- Security, modern automotive systems need to have more redundant security data storage. In the automotive sector, safety is reflected in reliable, long-term stable operation, functional safety orientation after component failure, and quality control of error-free design and production. Through the design and control of these three dimensions, the SSD car scale can fully guarantee the safety of data storage.
DiskMFR’s SSD series products have developed various case shapes for various applications, including BGA, M.2, U.2, etc. Among them, SSD BGA is characterized by size, capacity, performance, power consumption, reliability, shock, and vibration resistance and is another choice for large-capacity storage products for vehicles.
DiskMFR’s strengths in automotive storage
Combined with the above, it is easy to see that with the new requirements of the intelligent vehicle era, traditional and single-storage products obviously cannot meet the development needs of the current and future automotive industry. Memory manufacturers need to design and develop automotive-scale memory products with different specifications, shapes, and interfaces according to different need scenarios.
DiskMFR relies on the quality of flash analysis ability, the level gauge car memory controller ability for the independent design and development of special firmware algorithm capabilities, at the same time the construction of the autonomous vehicle level gauge test laboratory and validation processes, the final Through the vertical integration of the complete solution of automatic storage products, DiskMFR is a great advantage in the field of automatic storage.
Another major advantage is the quality management of DiskMFR’s automotive storage products. It is well known that the automotive supply chain requires stricter quality control standards and relatively longer product delivery cycles. DiskMFR has integrated design quality and production process quality into product quality control. right from the start and established a comprehensive quality management system. The vehicle gauge memory control chip contains the proprietary chip ID that is stored in the OTP area and can be traced back to the original wafer lot. In the production process of memory products on an automotive scale, tests are carried out layer by layer, from the wafer selection to the finished DVTProduct verification, PVT mass production verification, and PM mass monitoring for the realization of final products. So automotive gauges can undergo high and low-temperature aging, high-temperature storage, data reading interference testing, temperature cycling, endurance testing, reliability testing, and long-term stability to ensure the quality requirements of automotive customers.
Conclusion
After the auto industry experienced the core crisis last year, the major domestic automakers will put the availability of auto products in a very important position. In terms of storage controller and firmware algorithm, DiskMFR has completely independent intellectual property. Storage rights and firmware algorithm based on its powerful chip self-research ability and strong technology accumulation. In terms of flash storage resources, DiskMFR maintains good interaction and cooperation with major international flash OEMs, among which DiskMFR is the first partner of Changjiang Storage Ecosystem Xtacking.
Faced with the revolution of the century in the automotive industry, DiskMFR has embraced the new storage possibilities brought about by the automotive revolution and boldly entered the field of high-end flash memory. In addition, the chip replacement process is accelerated due to the lack of an automotive core and the continuously long delivery cycle. With the integration of flash particles and internal controller chips, firmware, technology research, automobiles under strict rules, and safety certifications, the formation of vertical integration memory controllers as the core of innovative ability in the field of automatic flash memory is inevitably one, just like the development of the global Auto- Blitz contributes its own force.
