ADAS, Infotainment, Functional Safety, and System Design: How Cadence is Ready for Automotive Electronics Revolution

Cadence Automotive Innovations Platform: From Concept to Silicon to System

The automotive industry has been one of the most dynamic due to the accelerated rise of new technologies and changing customer preferences. It is going through an electronic revolution triggered by autonomous driving, connectivity in vehicles, and electrification. The advancements in electronics are the key contributors to innovations such as ADAS, infotainment, functional safety, system design, etc. These innovations are leading to a shift from internal combustion engines (ICE) to electric vehicles (EV). The global EV market is expected to reach $800 billion by 2030.

But this revolution comes with a caveat. Unlike other applications, the malfunctioning electronic components are very lethal and may lead to fatalities. Also, these innovations and new applications necessitate more functionality on the chip leading to more complexity in the design and verification of SoC.

Challenges

Semiconductor content in automobiles has been increasing steadily over the last decade as we are moving from simple cruise control (no sensors) to a multi-sensor scenario (hands off, eyes on) to mind off (L5).

All these innovative technologies will dramatically increase the complexity of the chip and demand migration to the latest process nodes. Recent chip developments have demonstrated that impressive performance can be achieved with a highly automated driving platform. Foundries claim that 5nm provides about 20% faster speed or about 40% power reduction and is ideally suited for the next generation of automotive processors. Designers face issues like re-spins, field failures, compliance certifications (ISO26262), longer testing time, reliability and safety, etc. Also, a purpose-built SoC (system-on-chip) or system-in-package (SiP) is needed to meet demanding requirements like feature set, performance per Watt, safety, and security—all integrated on a single chip instead of a PCB. To deliver safe, secure, and reliable vehicles, OEMs and designers face many challenges to meet the customer expectations:

• Increasing complexity leads to advanced node migration and verification challenges
• Managing the computational needs
• Early development of prototypes
• Reducing Re-spins
• Safety and Security
• Sense, Compute and communicate
• Quick design – Accelerate idea to realization, IP design
• System Analysis
• SW and System Verification
• PCB and ECU Design for high frequency, high-speed requirements

Cadence Solution for Automotive Electronics

Cadence provides the technology, tools, and IP to address such challenges in the automotive industry. The latest innovations from Cadence, as in the below figure, enable OEMs to complete the design tasks in challenging applications such as ADAS, infotainment, functional safety, system design, etc.

Cadence enables OEMs to sustain fast-changing market demands and environmental pressures. We provide a comprehensive portfolio of products, solutions, and services for automotive chips, packages, boards, embedded software, and system design. Cadence Innovation Highlights platform is a flexible platform showcasing our automotive solutions for various target applications. It helps customers to discover the Cadence solution for automotive electronics design. The latest Innovations from Cadence to enable customers to design safe and secure vehicles are now just a click away.

Summary

We provide various solutions from system to SoC design and IPs to help the industry design safe, secure, and reliable vehicles. For instance, Cadence Tensilica is the common acceleration platform for radar, LiDAR (light detection and ranging), ultrasound applications in ADAS and Tensilica HiFi for infotainment.

Tensilica HiFi is the de facto industry standard for voice processing and is being used in major SoCs in the industry. For functional safety, we provide full flow, starting from the FMEDA level to SoC verification by fault injection and response. For automotive SoC enablement, we provide certified EDA flows, ASIL-B certified IP, and functional safety design and verification tools to achieve ISO26262 compliance.  In addition to this, we also have all the design IP and building blocks that are required to build automotive SoCs.

Learn More

• Discover Cadence Automotive Innovations
• Automotive SoC Design: Cadence
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