A new jointly developed solution has been unveiled and features NXP’s S32E2 processors, which are part of NXP's comprehensive S32 Automotive Processing Platform. The S32E addresses the vehicle’s need for high-performance deterministic real-time domain and zonal control in a multi-applications environment.
The rapid evolution of new centralised vehicle architectures and the consolidation of electronic control units (ECUs) demand a high level of safe application integration. NXP and Rimac Technology’s jointly developed architecture provides a platform that allows the development and efficient integration of many different vehicle applications such as vehicle dynamics and charging control, energy and thermal management, and body electronics.
The S32E2 allows the consolidation of over 20 ECUs into just three centralised units. It is part of NXP’s high performance multi-application processor range and integrates 8 Arm Cortex-R52 processor cores running at up to 1 GHz, high-resolution analogue-to-digital converters and the capability to support large amounts of non-volatile memory, up to 64MB.
“OEMs and tier 1s have faced the challenge of either consolidating multiple applications within legacy microcontrollers or deploying excessive redundant computing power to achieve application independence”, explained Ray Cornyn, SVP and General Manager, Automotive Processors at NXP. “The NXP platform allows developers to quickly implement SDV features for advanced real-time applications. The S32E2 enables the efficient integration of numerous applications within an easy-to-debug environment, where task isolation and determinism are inherent to the design.”
“The growing complexity of vehicle systems with numerous ECUs requires a solution that decreases weight, manages power consumption and simplifies software integration”, said Ana Martinčić Špoljarić, Business Unit Director for Powertrain and Electronics at Rimac Technology. “With NXP’s S32E2 real-time processors, we found a solution that allows us to integrate several units into a single domain controller, reducing complexity and material costs for automotive OEMs while significantly increasing computational power.”
The ISO 26262 ASIL D compliant S32E2 series serves the diverse automotive OEM needs by providing safe and secure high-performance processing that is essential for SDVs. Its comprehensive safety offering with core to pin isolation mechanism ensures freedom of interference and task level fault recovery throughout the device. The integrated, powerful Hardware Security Engine provides secure boot, key management and security services.
Rimac Technology said that it would look to primarily leverage the new ECU platform in a hyper car program, with plans to scale up in different vehicle segments and alternative mobility sectors.
The S32E2 extends NXP’s S32 automotive processing platform and fits between the recently introduced S32K5 microcontroller family and the 5 nm S32N real-time super integration processors.
Combined with NXP’s networking and system power management solutions and the middleware, OSes and other software from the world’s leading automotive software providers under the NXP CoreRide platform, these system solutions help automakers overcome software and hardware integration barriers, while scaling development efforts for new architectures in SDVs.
NXP offers system support for S32E2 processors to accelerate customer designs including the FS86 ASIL D safety system basis chip (SBC) and PF5030 power management IC (PMIC) with enhanced safety features and in-vehicle networking support with Ethernet switches and PHYs and CAN transceivers, along with other analogue companion chips, IGBT/SiC high-voltage inverter gate drivers and battery cell controllers.
