Infineon, Supporting Dependability for Automotive MCUs with Model-Based Design

OK. Hello, everybody. My name is Thomas Knight. I am at Infineon, responsible for software partner and ecosystem management at Automotive Microcontroller. And I'm happy to be able today to be part of MATLAB EXPO and as one of the contributors to this great event. My topic today is all around how model-based design can very well support our philosophy of dependability for our automotive microcontrollers. For me, this is a very interesting topic. And I would like to elaborate that a little bit for you.

So the topics I'm going to talk about today-- number one, I want to spend some time describing to you what dependability means for us, that you understand what we mean by this. Then I'm going to talk about the development journey of our customers and some specifics around that. And in the next section, I'm talking about the MathWorks Hardware Support Package for one of our new microcontrollers, our TC4x generation. And I'm going to summarize then afterwards for you.

Getting to this topic of dependability, I want to start why-- the background, a little bit, before I get to the topic of dependability-- we see in the automotive market currently a very strong and fast evolution of the environment, specific these service-based architectures require new E/E architectures with innovations that have very specific requirements for microcontrollers in general.

And specifically for us, and our contribution is that we need to offer significantly higher functional safety performance, up to the highest possible level, ASIL- and the significantly increased security and connectivity also in combination to each other. And as the complexity of the system and the components is increasing, specifically the software development methods need to improve to in order to manage in a better way the complexity.

On the other hand, we see the very strong trends on the electrification side, which is an ongoing trend. So we see this focus towards zero emission legislation is really a key driver for us, for the entire company. So we offer a lot of products and solutions to support zero emission vehicles in the market. And we see many OEMs with a clear focus towards battery electric vehicles, so all about real green.

And we also believe, along this strategy, that there will be a further trend that the hybrid setup of vehicles will rather reduce. And there will be more and more strong focus towards full electrification. And therefore, we see that the development of the next generation engine and transmission philosophy is turning completely in this direction. So this is really something which is part of our core beliefs and is driving our strategy and our product development.

Now, along with the technology and the products we develop, already since some time, we developed a philosophy, which is a holistic new way how we want to make our products much more robust and define the products in a way that we can offer really significant improvements to our customers with dependability. And dependability is, from our point of view, a variety really of requirements, which we can offer from scalability, from quality levels.

So like our zero defect philosophy security safety at the highest possible industry level, lifecycle management, long-time availability, and robustness I already mentioned. So everything, which means state of the art products, this is, in total, our philosophy, where we develop our products in the direction of this robust philosophy.

And with a track record we see in the market for all our products and specifically also with our AURIX products for example, as micro-automotive microcontrollers, we see really a big success in the market. And we see that this is highly resonating with the requirements of our customers. And as a track record, we can say that we sold already more than a billion TriCores since '99 into the automotive market. And we see currently a huge pipeline in front of us, which we are serving with that kind of product.

So we really can see that our dependability philosophy is paying off. And it's bringing value to our customers. So therefore, it's important that with everything we do around our products, also in terms of ecosystem support and solutions, this is following the same kind of philosophy. I will come later on more to this and explain to you why this is so relevant. Now, on top of what I explained before, for autonomous driving, we have this additional requirement that we need high availability of systems which can be achieved with dependable electronics.

And I'm going to tell you why you can see the safety aspects of such a philosophy like an onion model. And you see this illustrated also here in the slide. So for high level of autonomy autonomy, which means level 4 plus, it's absolutely crucial that you have this availability under all conditions with even extended time because your driver in a level 4 plus system is not able to react any more in a short period of time.

And the basis, the root of this availability is fail-operational system behavior. And this is now the next level. So fail operation, you need inside of level 3 kind of systems, which are already available today. And it must be assured that safety critical tasks happen in the desired way, which means you mitigate all kind of potential adverse effects. And your system behaves within a certain mode of operation.

The basis of this is the fail-safe mode, which you need to be able to offer. And fail-safe behavior and is available in level 2 ADA system, already since some time. These kind of systems always behave in a safe mode and need to offer reliable, robust, and safe, and secure product's behind. And you already see these behaviors. These are all elements which can be offered by our products and are offered by products like in AURIX.

And now, I'm getting to the level of AURIX functionality. Our newest products, TC4x, have really advanced performance offerings, like our latest TriCore running on 500 megahertz and supported by various hardware support functions, like our PPU, which is a scalar core vector unit with high performance capability. We have a radar subsystem. We have an ATD converter substance and a data routing engine.

Specifically, the PPU, I'm going to talk about this later on because this has definitely relevance also in terms of what I'm speaking of today. Then also in the other areas, safety and security support, all these requirements are on the highest possible industry levels. Freedom from interference, very important for the safety case of such a component. And I mentioned it already shortly, rich connectivity. These are all key requirements our customers have. And a product like TC4x can offer functionality at state of the art level in all these dimensions.

From this point, I'm now going to talk about the customer journey and how the features I explained to you are contributing in a very positive way to the customer journey. So with the requirements we have in the different application segments, like e-mobility, autonomous driving, which we were talking of before, and integration platforms and connectivity, we have specific features in this homogeneous architecture of AURIX TC4x which support these requirements very well.

And one of these specific components we have inside of this architecture is the PPU, the vector processing unit, which can support certain topics like AI, predictive control, and advanced signal processing in a very effective way. And for this, we need a new kind of way how such acceleration units are programmed in a more ease of use way and in a modern way to be able to manage the complexity of that component.

And with MATLAB Simulink, we have exactly the right environment available, which is able to offer a workflow, which reduces the complexity in the right way and utilizes the advantages of the heterogeneous architecture in the best way. So we're really happy that we have such a tool available. And specifically now, the model-based support for AURIX TC4x, you can see here in this chart visualized on the left side the classical way with handcrafted software, with different software architectures, which you can do on the one side.

But-- and this is shown on the right side with model-based design-- for this architecture with model-based design, we really see that this is the right way to program such an accelerator in a very effective way by using legacy code, which is actually already available, using the tool sets, and using this workflow of the model-based design to come very fast in an effective way to running code plus the advantage that we have optimized libraries available. So also in this combination, our customers can develop their application in a straightforward ease of use way and can generate very good results even with such complex devices like a heterogeneous architecture like AURIX TC4x.

In terms of the supporting ecosystem, we work very closely together with MathWorks, generating such capable tools. But we are also working together with a larger ecosystem around us on the different levels, whether that's software generation, whether that's combined hardware software development tools, and also trainings and services, which are needed for that. And together with this, we are able to offer to our customers a holistic ecosystem, which offers support in all the required areas.

Now, I want to speak a little bit more specifically about the capability of the hardware support package for TC4x. So today, I can say the hardware support package is available, even already in a second generation release. So I'm really happy that we can make this capability already available to customers. It provides really a realistic simulation capability, which is highly desired by our customers, so really ease of use for our customers with their customer journey.

It's capable of translating the available models-- what I said, legacy, Simulink legacy models-- into executable and optimized code, as I said before. And with this, we really see that this methodology, this workflow is highly optimized to utilize the capability of the PPU. And with this, we can say we have a capability of fast evaluation of application models on the hardware. And the access through the MATLAB Toolbox Library is a big success.

And it does definitely not require deep knowledge of our hardware and software environment. And saying this, I know that AURIX is a very, very complicated environment. And we are very happy that, with this workflow, we can really offer ease of use to our customers. Let me share some words at the end also in to our collaboration and strategic engagement together with MathWorks.

So already since a long time, it took really some time to develop this technology together for the hardware support package for TC4x. So it's a long-term journey. And with this, we can fully enhance the capability of our products and bring this to our customer in a much more ease of use way. We will extend that also in the future. So today, it's TC4x. It's wide-span also for all the different variants.

We will bring it to the market, which is going to be supported by the HSP support. And we want to continue this also in the future. And the benefit is really that we have a much more improved embedded system development, throughput time. We anticipate 30% to 40% benefit in time saving over traditional approaches. We know that the validation of use cases is significantly enhanced with that.

And I said it already several times. Without knowing the AURIX by heart with its 10,000 pages of user manual, our customers are able to generate and drive their solution in a short period of time, which I see is one of the most desired advantages out of such a technology. And with this, I already want to offer you a summary of all the points. So I was starting this journey with the changes in automotive on the architecture side, as well as on the electrification of cars.

I explained to you why AURIX TC4x, the newest generation, is addressing especially the requirements of our customers and how the software ecosystem, and specifically also this combination with Simulink, is addressing this topic. The system design challenge is significantly improved and addressed by model-based design flow. And for the TC4-- with TC4x HSP, this is exactly the support we needed.

And the relationship, together with MathWorks, I can promise you is oriented in the future. So we want to make this technology available for all our products in the future because we are absolutely convinced that it's the right solution we require for our complex products to offer ease of use for our customers. So thank you very much today. And I hope you still have a great EXPO and you are thrilled by all the innovations you're going to see over the next period of time. Thank you very much.