Renesas unveils automotive gateway solution with R-Car S4 SoCs and PMICs

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today unveiled an innovative automotive gateway solution with R-Car S4 system-on-chips (SoCs) and power management ICs (PMICs) for next-generation vehicle computers, communication gateways, domain servers and application servers.

Renesas’ new solution meets the automotive industry’s demands for high-speed networking, security, performance, and functional safety levels required as E/E architectures evolve into domains and zones.

The solution also improves development efficiency by enabling software reusability and including the new best-in-class PMICs designed to work seamlessly with the R-Car S4.

“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 VP and GMof 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.”

The Renesas R-Car S4 is one of the first products in Renesas’ 4th-generation R-Car Family. It includes multiple Arm Cortex A55, Cortex R52 and is the first to implement an RH850 MCU for control domain management.

The R-Car S4 SoCs offer a large number of automotive interfaces such as 16x CAN FD, 16x LIN, 8x SENT, 1x FlexRay, 4x PCIe V4.0, and a high-bandwidth 3 x 2.5Gbit Ethernet Switch to enable rich communication and connectivity options inside and outside of the vehicle.

The R-Car S4 solution allows designers to re-use up to 88 percent 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.

In addition, a virtual platform (VPF) is available from a partner company, enabling early software development and evaluation to reduce design time and cost.

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.

Features

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 bandwidth of 3 x 2.5 Gbps to deliver fast and low-latency communication in the vehicle backbone and to the outside world. This switch is fully validated by Spirent’s TSN conformance test solutions running on their Automotive C1 test system.
Incorporated 8MB SRAM to execute 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 to 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