March_Smart Capsule Chipset Topics|Global Smart Capsule SoC Chipset Supplier Product Technology Analysis(Part1)
With the development of automotive technology towards intelligence and electrification, its electronic and electrical architecture is evolving according to the trend of distributed, domain centralized and centralized. In the early mechanized cockpit era, a distributed architecture was adopted, such as instrumentation, center console and other cockpit equipment was controlled by a dedicated electronic control unit (ECU) in a "single crystal, single screen" mode, with no need for information exchange between the units, so the cockpit chips of the period used multiple microcontrollers (MCUs) with a single function. When the cabin entered the electronic era, in order to enhance consumers' willingness to buy cars, car manufacturers gradually introduced various electronic devices such as digital gauges, multimedia center screens, head-up displays, digital mirrors, etc., and started exchanging information among different devices to increase the fun of driving, and the penetration rate has increased dramatically in the last few years. However, the signal connection between the microcontrollers of each device is prone to delays, and the expansion of the functions of electronic devices requires the use of microcontrollers with better performance and higher prices, which, in addition to the large number of devices used, can lead to a significant increase in the cost of the cockpit. Therefore, the development of the main control SoC chip to handle all the electronic devices in the cabin signal "single crystal multi-screen" mode, although its unit price is higher, but only 1 ~ 2 units, so can effectively reduce the overall cost, and the chip signal transmission speed is much higher than the communication port transmission to solve the signal delay problem. At this time, the electronic and electrical structure of automobiles has also entered a period of domain centralization. In the early stages of development, the operation of the vehicle was controlled by five domain controllers, such as powertrain, chassis control, body control, automated driving, and intelligent cockpit. As technology continues to advance, chipset vendors are developing master SoC chips that can integrate autonomous driving and intelligent cabin functions, which will bring the technology into the "cross-domain convergence" stage, with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Flex platform to be the first product to be launched in 2023. In the future, if the performance of the main control SoC chip and in-vehicle operating system technology can be greatly improved, vehicle operation can be controlled by a single SoC chip, forming a centralized electronic and electrical architecture.