Since 2017, with the rapid growth of the demand for automotive applications, the global automotive semiconductor market has expanded in an all-round way. However, since the second half of 2018, the global semiconductor industry has been in a downturn due to the impact of Sino US trade competition, global economic instability and Huawei events. However, it is undeniable that with the continuous development of self driving, Internet of vehicles and other related technologies in the future, vehicle MCU will be an important part.
Driven by the demand for higher performance and higher specification of vehicle MCU, the more stable cooperation between traditional vehicle semiconductor plants and silicon intellectual property (IP) plants has been promoted. For example, the development of MCU based on ARM cortex series has become the mainstream, and the penetration rate continues to rise.
In the past, for automotive MCU products, automotive semiconductor manufacturers focused on self-development, intending to make differences in product competitiveness. However, under the pressure of other chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, etc. entering the automotive chip market, traditional semiconductor manufacturers also had to reduce costs and maintain technical advantages in product development.
From the 32-bit vehicle MCU product lines provided by Renesas, NXP, Texas Instruments, Infineon, microchip, cypress, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba, we can see that there are basically MCU designs with arm Cortex-M or arm cortex-r as the CPU core, and vigorously develop MCU product lines, so as to expand to more vehicle applications.
After using the CPU core of IP factory, the development of vehicle MCU will undoubtedly be faster and better. The traditional vehicle semiconductor factory can also save a lot of cost and verification time in the development process.
In addition, in recent years, automotive SOC has attracted much attention. Automotive computers need more complex computing and processing capabilities, which makes the demand for automotive single chip continue to rise. Since most of the main suppliers of automotive SOC use ARM core architecture for chip development, it is not only conducive to the compatibility between MCU and Automotive SOC, but also in the integration of system and software for MCU to use arm architecture as operation unit It can also enhance the purchase intention of vehicle manufacturers or system developers.
In general, in the future, the automotive electronic system will create more market demand for high-end automotive MCU, and it will also be more conducive to the layout and profit of automotive semiconductor plants and IP suppliers in vehicle applications.
