Freescale Adopts Cortex-M to Address Exponential Electronic Content Growth in Vehicles

Yesterday in Shanghai, Freescale Semiconductor made a significant announcement to bring their Kinetis EA series of MCUs into the automotive market.

Thus far, ARM’s success in automotive has mainly been with the ARM® Cortex®-A and Cortex-R processor families in the following areas:

• Infotainment, graphical dashboards, and audio systems with our Cortex-A family, including Freescale’s i.MX family, where these complex SoCs leverage the consumer-oriented ecosystem support such as operating system support.
• Safety systems, such as braking and airbags, leverage our Cortex-R family with its combination of high performance and real-time capability that allows complex algorithm calculations and deterministic system behavior.

There are many other areas in the vehicle beyond infotainment, dashboards, audio, braking and airbags. The following figure highlights electronic control box (ECU) units in the automotive.

For many functions such as Infotainment, dashboard, audio, and powertrain there is just one ECU, but in the body of the car, there are dozens of ECUs.

Body electronics are so pervasive in the car. They represent functions like door locks, mirror adjustments, seat adjustments, heated and cooled seats, remote keyless entry, lighting controls and many more as illustrated in the graphic below. These modules are largely the command and control type of ECUs that are all about comfort and convenience. I cannot imagine owning a car today without keyless entry or push button windows or door locks. These features have become the norm and they are everywhere in the vehicle.

The total available market for body electronics is quite high if you aggregate all the different body functions in a car.

The growth potential for ARM and Freescale in automotive is going to expand for several reasons.

First, as new convenience functions like power-lift gate become standard functions in entry and mid-level cars, the volume production will increase. Secondly, the Cortex-M family will provide both the performance and scalability required for current and future needs in body electronics. Body ECUs have become more complex with CAN networking and the integration of functions pushing some body ECUs beyond the capability of 8 and 16-bit MCUs.

So why is this so significant?

• With Freescale’s experience in creating automotive-qualified families and building on the long partnership between ARM and Freescale, I expect a rapid expansion in the vehicle of general purpose Cortex-M-based MCUs beyond the high-end processing success ARM has had with Cortex-A and Cortex-R families.
• Freescale’s Kinetis EA series MCUs (ARM Cortex-M0+ core, 8k-128k flash, -40/+125deg. C) offers a cost-effective ARM-based solution that can address a wide range of automotive applications.
• Cortex-M family will give automotive developers the increased performance as well as the ability to integrate more functions in a single ECU. Instead of a single ECU for each body function, they can create body zone controllers.
• Reduced time-to-market by leveraging ARM’s ecosystem support for software tools that allow model-based auto code generation, best-in-class code compilation density, and powerful debug capabilities.
• I expect the Kinetis EA series will be the first of many MCU series to come from Freescale that will use the Cortex-M family in other areas of automotive.

Having a partner like Freescale, a leader in automotive electronics, working with ARM to address the exponential electronic content growth in vehicles with our architecture is pretty awesome!