The automotive industry is going through a massive transformation. The consumer based digital technologies and experiences are pushing the car in vehicle Information system to the next level. Consumers are asking for cars with mobile like experiences. The Infotainment system needs to provide touch like experience and also support heavy workloads of storage map and navigation data as car gets connected to the cloud.
How does the car OEM go ahead and select the memory for next generation Infotainment system?
What are the factors for selecting the automotive Infotainment memory solution?
Automotive Infotainment memory solution is selected based on the following factors
- Storage Capacity
- Performance
- Speed
- Reliability
- Faster Read and write cycles
Traditionally the memory had limited applications and one would go ahead with the Emmc Interface, however the currently emmC has run out of capacity when coming is advanced Infotainment system applications in the car.
What are the limitations of emmC when it comes to Infotainment system ?
- Emmc has the limited number of reads are write like any other flash architecture and the memory begins to start to degrade. The automotive life span is over 10 plus years however memory card storage ie 8GB emmC would have the life of upto 4 years. Most of the advanced car like Tesla was earlier using 8GB storage and had to replace to 64G storage for the emmC ensuring longer life of the emmC.
- High Definition media play back operations: The next generation consumers are demanding new experiences like augmented reality and immersive experience. This is forcing car manufactures to look at advanced technologies which can offer simultaneous read-write cycles. EMMC is half duplex ie it can either support read or write cycle.
- Data Integrity: Emmc offers very limited support for data integrity such as write protection and error correction.
What is the path forward ?
UFS seems to very promising technology offering the good replacement solution for the Emmc when its comes to Infotainment system. UFS is much faster and is already used in current generation mobile to offer immersive experience. UFS offers full duplex interface for read and write increasing speed and giving high performance and also the speeds upto 4800MB/s and vendors like Samsung have release memory chip supporting up to 1TB of data. UFS is engineered to support low power mode which is extremely important for any automotive application. UFS also has advanced features like Error correction to have safe and reliable storage for automotive application. We have to wait and see how the various memory vendors like Kioxia, Samsung and Silicon motion have their solutions for Automotive grade UFS.
Prodigy Technovations offers state of art advanced tools to test UFS ,emmC and PCIe interfaces of the memory. The tools can help automotive car manufacturer debug protocol data and help find out very critical timing and protocol integrity issues.
