Infineon Technologies recently announced the extension of its AURIX™ microcontroller family and availability of the first samples of the company’s new AURIX TC4x family of 28 nm microcontrollers (MCUs) for next-generation eMobility, ADAS, automotive E/E architectures and affordable artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

The new family provides an upward migration path for the company’s leading AURIX TC3x MCU family. It features the next-generation TriCore™ 1.8, along with scalable performance enhancements from the AURIX accelerator suite. This includes the new parallel processing unit (PPU), a SIMD vector digital signal processor (DSP) which addresses the demands of various AI topologies. This may include use cases as diverse as real-time control and radar post processing. The scalable family concept allows for a common software architecture enabling significant platform software savings.

Targeting a wide range of automotive applications including the strong demand for functional integration in domain and zone based E/E architectures, the AURIX TC4x supports both eMobility and the advancement of automated driving through safety systems. Infineon’s AURIX TC4x offers enhanced connectivity including advanced safety and security to further expand the company’s automotive leadership in dependable electronics.

Additionally, new SOTA (Software Over the Air) features help fulfill OEM demands for fast and secure car-to-cloud connection, enabling updates in the field, plus diagnosis and analysis during vehicle usage. The new MCU family supports high-speed communication interfaces like 5 Gbit Ethernet and PCI Express® along with new interfaces such as CAN-XL and 10BASE T1S Ethernet. This increased network throughput and connectivity gives customers the performance and flexibility needed to implement new E/E architectures.

“Our new AURIX TC4x family pushes the boundaries in automotive MCU usage for safe and secure processing,” said Thomas Boehm, Senior Vice President Automotive Microcontroller at Infineon. “Its optimized architecture based on smart accelerators gives customers the real-time performance and networking throughput they demand. The new MCU family once again will establish itself as the leading building block for future-proof systems in the automobile industry.”

Given the growing vehicle complexity and the enablement of AI implementations, significant focus has been placed on the AURIX TC4x ecosystem to ensure fast time-to-market and ease-of-use. Infineon is collaborating with Synopsys to accelerate software development for the AURIX TC4x family. The Synopsys Virtualizer™ Development Kit (VDK) for TC4x enables software to be developed much earlier in the design cycle. The Synopsys DesignWare® ARC® MetaWare Toolkit for AURIX TC4x provides optimal compilers, debuggers, and libraries as well as a simulator needed to develop software for the PPU.

“Building advanced automotive systems to address stringent safety functionality requires the implementation of AI technology using both hardware and software,” said John Koeter, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IP at Synopsys. “Our collaboration with Infineon to provide the DesignWare ARC MetaWare Toolkit and VDK for AURIX TC4x helps Infineon’s customers develop AI-driven functionality in the AURIX TC4x for applications such as powertrain and ADAS processing that meet safety, performance, and power-efficiency requirements.”

Additional partner offerings will follow suit and MATLAB support will be available for auto-code generation to enable rapid prototyping. Customers already implementing existing AURIX MCUs will profit from an accelerated time-to-market thanks to the scalable multi-generation family concept. Significant hardware and software compatibility allows for extensive re-use of customers’ existing TC3x algorithms and ecosystem.

The AURIX TC49x is sampling now at selected customers, the start of production is scheduled for the second half of 2024. More information is available at www.infineon.com/aurixTC4x.