Challenges for Automotive Designers
Three key challenges faced by today’s automotive electronics system designers:
- Achieving faster development cycles
- Developing cost-effective and flexible solutions
- Meeting quality and safety requirements
Faster Development Cycles
The gap between consumer and automotive technologies has narrowed significantly with automotive innovations keeping pace with consumer or in some cases, leading. For example, video analytics for driver assist systems rely on ultra-low latency precision algorithms to analyze real-time video feeds from a vehicle’s cameras and make split-second decisions. System designers need to use the latest silicon to achieve these levels, but new ASIC/ASSP development schedules cannot keep up with the faster development cycles.
Impact of FPGAs
More and more system designers are using FPGAs for volume applications because of the following advantages they offer:
- Shorter time to market compared to ASIC solution through re-programmability and reduced risk vs. an ASSP with the ability to fix bugs without a redesign
- Do not go through the same time consuming physical design, design-rule closure, tape-out, and fabrication processes that ASICs do
- Ability to make hardware changes available in FPGAs are not an option with ASSP and microcontroller unit (MCU) designs
- Altera’s Quartus® II design software offers innovative technologies to speed up system design and take advantage of FPGA in-system verification to reduce debugging effort
Cost-Effective and Flexible Solutions
Automotive OEMs are struggling with the economic and logistic realities of differentiating vehicles across hundreds of models and options. Many recognize the need for a modular system design approach based on flexible platforms that are customizable across several vehicle models or grades (entry, mid, high, or luxury).
Impact of FPGAs
- Ability to scale the size of the FPGA within the same package so you can increase logic resources using the same board design
- Meet your exact system requirements using an FPGA resulting in an optimized system of the features you want and you do not pay extra for features you will not use
- Easily support multiple types of image, radar and laser sensors, and various network connectivity options like controller area network (CAN), FlexRay, media-oriented system transport (MOST), and Ethernet AVB
- Wide range of automotive-grade devices including Cyclone® series FPGAs, MAX® II CPLDs, and Cyclone V SoC FPGAs with ARM-based hard processor system (HPS)
Quality and Safety
Safety practices are becoming more regulated as industries adopt a standardized set of procedures for designing and testing products. ISO 26262 is a risk-based safety standard, where the risk of hazardous operational situations are qualitatively assessed and safety measures are defined to avoid or control systematic failures and random hardware failures, or mitigate their effects.
Altera's automotive quality and safety certifications are as follow:
- Altera is the first and only programmable logic supplier whose products, intellectual property (IP), tools and tool flow have been certified for IEC 61508 functional safety, the basis for the ISO 26262 automotive specification, helping you to save 18-24 months of development time in certifying safety applications
- Altera is a leader in automotive quality with AEC-Q100 qualified-automotive grade devices and a TS16949 certified manufacturing flow for its wafer fabs, package and assembly, programming, and test sites
