Automotive gateway solution for next-generation vehicle computers

Renesas Electronics Corporation has unveiled an innovative automotive gateway solution with R-Car S4 SoCs and PMICs for next-generation vehicle computers, communication gateways, domain servers and application servers. The company's new solution satisfies the automotive industry's high demands for high performance, high-speed networking, high security and high functional safety levels that are needed as E/E architectures evolve into domains and zones. The solution also notably increases development efficiency by allowing software reusability and incorporating the new best-in-class PMICs created 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 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.”

The S4 is one of the first products in its fourth-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. Its SoCs provide a huge number of 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 to facilitate rich communication and connectivity options inside and outside of the vehicle.

The solution enables designers to re-use up to 88% of software code developed for third-generation R-Car SoC and RH850 MCU applications. The software package supports R-Car S4 application development, incorporating the real-time cores with multiple drivers and basic software, including Linux BSP and hypervisors. Also, a virtual platform (VPF) is offered from a partner company, facilitating early software development and evaluation to decrease design time and cost.

The new PMICs for R-Car provide advanced power modes that support very low power operation. The RAA271041 PMIC accepts the vehicle’s 12V supply and supports wide operation for load dump and cold cranking pulses while giving the first-stage regulation. The RAA271005 is a Safe 11-channel PMIC that uses the RAA271041’s output and steps it down further to the multiple supply voltages required by R-Car S4 and its peripherals such as LPDDR4x memory. The PMICs offer a complete power solution from vehicle battery down to system voltage.

The company will offer the evaluation boards as a Winning Combination solution highlighting the R-Car S4 device, the RAA271041 and RAA271005 PMICs, and a Renesas timing IC (Autoclock RC2121x). This pre-tested solution will lessen risk in the board design and will further reduce the development cycle.