Freescale's New Automotive MCU Is Designed for Software Engineers
A new family of ARM Cortex-based microcontrollers (MCUs) promises to help designers speed and simplify the creation of automotive products ranging from power seats and door locks to touch interfaces and chassis controls.
The S32K’s hardware evaluation and development platforms will be available in the third quarter of 2015. (Source: Freescale Semiconductor)
Known as the S32K, the new MCU family is said to be the first such product designed specifically for software engineers. “We’re trying to shift the discussion from bits and bytes at the silicon level to the platform level, and help our customers be more efficient with their software,” noted Matt Johnson, vice president and general manager of automotive MCUs for Freescale Semiconductor, maker of the new MCU family.
To meet those software needs, the new product family includes an automotive-grade software development kit, which provides middleware for the S32K’s drivers. Equally important, it incorporates a development platform called the S32 Design Studio that includes software and design tools.
The new family is targeted mostly at automotive applications connected to a vehicle’s CAN or LIN bus, such as seat motors, window lifts, power door locks, sun roofs, climate controls and infotainment, as well as chassis-based systems. It is not aimed at applications connected to Ethernet or safety-critical FlexRay data buses.
Freescale engineers hope that the new product family will help serve as a remedy to the growing software complexity that now captures the majority of design time in automotive electronics. At the recent Freescale Technology Forum, the company’s engineers said that today’s average vehicle now incorporates a stunning 100 million lines of software code on board. “It’s more than Windows, more than OS X and more than the Space Shuttle,” Johnson said. “As a rule, our customers only update what they absolutely have to, because R&D is often constrained by the software.”