It meets increased demands for high performance, high-speed networking, high security and high functional safety levels
An innovative automotive gateway solution for next-generation vehicle computers, communication gateways, domain servers and application servers are the new R-Car S4 system on chips (SoCs) and power management ICs (PMICs) Renesas Electronics Corporation. The new solution meets the automotive industry’s increased demands for high performance, high-speed networking, high security and high functional safety levels as required in the E/E architectures. The solution also dramatically improves development efficiency by enabling software reusability and including the new best-in-class PMICs designed to work seamlessly with the R-Car S4.
Renesas’ 4th-generation R-Car Family member, the R-Car S4 includes multiple Arm Cortex A55 and Cortex R52. The SoC is the first to implement an RH850 MCU for control domain management. The new product offers several automotive interfaces such as 16x CAN FD, 16x LIN, 8x SENT, 1x FlexRay, 4x PCIe V4.0 and also a high-bandwidth 3 x 2.5Gbit Ethernet Switch for rich communication and connectivity options both inside and outside of the vehicle.
The R-Car S4 allows designers to re-use up to 88 per cent of software code developed for 3rd generation R-Car SoC and RH850 MCU applications. The software package supports R-Car S4 application development including the real-time cores with various drivers and basic software such as Linux BSP and hypervisors. Additionally, a virtual platform (VPF) enables early software development and evaluation to reduce design time and cost.
Key Features of the R-Car S4 SoCs
- Eight 1.2 GHz Cortex A55 cores, one 1.0 GHz Cortex R52 dual-core (lock-step) and two 400 MHz RH850 G4MH dual cores (lock-step) deliver up to 27 KDMIPS application performance plus greater than 5.3 K DMIPS real-time performance
- Abundant automotive interfaces including 16x CAN FD, 16x LIN, 8x SENT, 1x FlexRay, and 4x PCIe V4.0 allow a wide range of connectivity inside the vehicle
- Integrated Ethernet TSN switch offers a bandwidth of 3 x 2.5 Gbps for faster and low-latency communication in the vehicle backbone and to the outside world.
- 8MB SRAM executes code on the RH850 G4MH core with low latency
- Multiple hardware security modules (HSMs) provide enhanced security protection against cyber attacks
- R-Car S4 is compliant with ISO-26262 and supports functional safety according to ASIL B and ASIL D
- 23mm square (R-Car S4) and 19mm square (R-Car S4N) FCBGA packages
The new PMICs for R-Car provide advanced power modes that support extremely low power operation. The RAA271041 PMIC accepts the vehicle’s 12V supply and supports wide operation for load dump and cold cranking pulses while providing the first-stage regulation. The RAA271005 is a Safe 11-channel PMIC that takes the RAA271041’s output and steps it down further to the various supply voltages needed by R-Car S4 and its peripherals such as LPDDR4x memory. The RAA271041 and RAA271005 PMICs provide a complete power solution from vehicle battery down to system voltage.
Key Features of the PMICs for R-Car
- Programmability enables easy adaption to support R-Car S4 and future R-Car SOCs
- RAA271041 and RAA271005 provide advanced power control to support extremely low power operation for always-on, DeepSTOP, cyclic-run and suspend-to-ram modes.
- RAA271041 is a pre-regulator that offers two 42V synchronous controllers, one buck and one boost. The device’s boost stage supports the buck stage when the battery voltage drops during cranking transients as low as 2.5V.
- RAA271041 and RAA271005 were developed per ISO-26262 and are capable of supporting system safety requirements up to ASIL D.
- Integrated 12-bit SAR ADC monitors external signals and eliminates an external ADC
- Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling changes output voltage to save power
- Optional spread-spectrum clocking mitigates EMI
- Built-in support for R-Car S4 activation streamlines SoC self-test procedures
Renesas will provide evaluation boards as a Winning Combination solution featuring the R-Car S4 device, the RAA271041 and RAA271005 PMICs and a Renesas timing IC (Autoclock RC2121x). This pre-tested solution will reduce risk in the board design and will further shorten the development cycle.
“As the vehicle architectures evolve, safe connection to cloud services and secure management with in-vehicle control systems are major challenges,” said Takeshi Kataoka, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Automotive Solution Business Unit at Renesas. “As an automotive market leader, we have addressed these challenges with our new R-Car S4 solution, and global OEMs have already begun to design next-generation systems with this solution.”
Samples of the R-Car S4 SoCs and evaluation boards are available now at Renesas Electronics. Samples of the RAA271041 and RAA271005 are also available.
