Cars Take the Wheel in Memory and Storage Innovation
A recurring theme I have raised over the past dozen blogs is that the automobile has transformed considerably over the course of the past few decades, from employing mature semiconductor technologies to the current state where the automotive market not only employs state-of-the-art technologies, but now drives development for semiconductor technologies.
This point is well illustrated by the memory and storage industry. Historically, the memory industry recognized the personal computer, then networking and communications applications, and finally smart phones as driving innovation. However, at last year’s JEDEC meeting (a forum to ensure alignment regarding memory standards to guarantee interoperability), representatives from the major memory and storage companies agreed that automotive applications have taken a front seat in terms of importance as a lead technology driver.
It’s no wonder why: today’s automobile employs leading-edge semiconductor devices and electrical/electronic (E/E) architectures, with some of the highest compute performance across the board. And it does so in an environment that is more stringent and unforgiving than that of the data center or smartphone. For any semiconductor device to be given practical consideration in an automotive application, there is a litany of quality specifications (AEC Q100, TS 16949, etc.) that must be supported in addition to guaranteed operation at extended temperatures that range from -40° C up to 125° C depending on the physical location of the semiconductor device. Memory and storage devices are no exception to these requirements.
Automotive is affecting all memory and storage types. In memory, the influence ranges from state-of-the-art HBM (high bandwidth memory), which is heavily embraced in the data center for generative AI, to low-power double data rate (LPDDR) and double data rate (DDR) memories; in storage devices, device types affected include universal flash storage (UFS) and solid-state drives (SSDs). These acronyms reflect the potpourri of different memory and storage technologies in the market: all of them can be found in today’s or tomorrow’s automobile. I’ll discuss many examples below and in a second blog post shortly to follow.
As the automotive industry accelerates towards the broad deployment of the software defined vehicle (SDV), there is an explosive growth in the number of lines of software used to control the vehicle. Today’s high-end vehicle contains well over 100 million lines of code, which is expected to grow to 1 billion lines of code by 2030. This alone is driving large storage requirements in the vehicle. Writing to semiconductor-based storage (flash) is a destructive process with a limited number of write cycles before a given re-written region of storage needs to be retired. The technique of tracking total storage write cycles and reallocating the written data to “fresh storage” is referred to as wear leveling.
Wear leveling ensures that the stored data is not lost due to writing to a storage cell that no longer supports data retention. The expired storage cells are retired and managed via an internal map created by the internal storage controller that tracks available vs. retired storage locations based on tracking write cycles to a given cell. With such a large code footprint, reaching up to 1 billion lines of code, it is not unreasonable to expect very frequent over the air (OTA) updates of that code over the 10-year lifespan of the vehicle. This leads to the need for a significantly larger storage footprint to accommodate regular updates or write cycles given the fixed number of write cycles that flash storage can support. Additionally, there is a need for at least twice the required storage to accommodate roll-back in case an OTA update was unsuccessful.
Suffice to say, security is of paramount importance, leading to the introduction of the ISO 21434 standard, which was expressly defined to address cyber security for automotive applications. This standard focuses on design methodologies used to design, test, and verify the design of memory and storage to guard against malicious attack. SDVs are designed expressly with OTA in mind, so state-of-the art security is paramount. An emerging branch of cybersecurity referred to as post-quantum computing (PQC) threatens to disrupt the current security landscape in just a few short years. This too will need to be given careful consideration to avoid malicious attacks and will again require state-of-the-art technologies in the vehicle down the road.
Continuing to look at the trajectory of automotive semiconductor storage technologies, because the SDV is driving a centralized architecture, the aggregation of all storage in one singular location leads to a more efficient means to support OTA updates in addition to increased overall board area and efficiency. An example of such efficiency that can be realized through centralized storage is illustrated by sharing such maps between advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). ADAS uses map data to navigate the roadways to get to the desired location, whereas the IVI system uses map data to display to the driver and passenger exactly where the vehicle is on the given roadway or to enter the desired location.
Centralized storage devices such as single root I/O virtualized (SR-IOV) SSDs allow for access to a common storage area from multiple different sources while providing hardware isolation, preventing user-downloaded applications from affecting mission critical code. Here again, SR-IOV represents some of the state of the art in storage technologies that are being employed in today’s automobile.
In part two, I’ll discuss how two more use cases—functional safety and context-aware navigation powered by multi-modal generative AI—are driving further innovation in memory and storage technologies.
A recurring theme I have raised over the past dozen blogs is that the automobile has transformed considerably over the course of the past few decades, from employing mature semiconductor technologies to the current state where the automotive market not only employs state-of-the-art technologies, but now drives development for semiconductor technologies.
This point is well illustrated by the memory and storage industry. Historically, the memory industry recognized the personal computer, then networking and communications applications, and finally smart phones as driving innovation. However, at last year’s JEDEC meeting (a forum to ensure alignment regarding memory standards to guarantee interoperability), representatives from the major memory and storage companies agreed that automotive applications have taken a front seat in terms of importance as a lead technology driver.
It’s no wonder why: today’s automobile employs leading-edge semiconductor devices and electrical/electronic (E/E) architectures, with some of the highest compute performance across the board. And it does so in an environment that is more stringent and unforgiving than that of the data center or smartphone. For any semiconductor device to be given practical consideration in an automotive application, there is a litany of quality specifications (AEC Q100, TS 16949, etc.) that must be supported in addition to guaranteed operation at extended temperatures that range from -40° C up to 125° C depending on the physical location of the semiconductor device. Memory and storage devices are no exception to these requirements.
Automotive is affecting all memory and storage types. In memory, the influence ranges from state-of-the-art HBM (high bandwidth memory), which is heavily embraced in the data center for generative AI, to low-power double data rate (LPDDR) and double data rate (DDR) memories; in storage devices, device types affected include universal flash storage (UFS) and solid-state drives (SSDs). These acronyms reflect the potpourri of different memory and storage technologies in the market: all of them can be found in today’s or tomorrow’s automobile. I’ll discuss many examples below and in a second blog post shortly to follow.
As the automotive industry accelerates towards the broad deployment of the software defined vehicle (SDV), there is an explosive growth in the number of lines of software used to control the vehicle. Today’s high-end vehicle contains well over 100 million lines of code, which is expected to grow to 1 billion lines of code by 2030. This alone is driving large storage requirements in the vehicle. Writing to semiconductor-based storage (flash) is a destructive process with a limited number of write cycles before a given re-written region of storage needs to be retired. The technique of tracking total storage write cycles and reallocating the written data to “fresh storage” is referred to as wear leveling.
Wear leveling ensures that the stored data is not lost due to writing to a storage cell that no longer supports data retention. The expired storage cells are retired and managed via an internal map created by the internal storage controller that tracks available vs. retired storage locations based on tracking write cycles to a given cell. With such a large code footprint, reaching up to 1 billion lines of code, it is not unreasonable to expect very frequent over the air (OTA) updates of that code over the 10-year lifespan of the vehicle. This leads to the need for a significantly larger storage footprint to accommodate regular updates or write cycles given the fixed number of write cycles that flash storage can support. Additionally, there is a need for at least twice the required storage to accommodate roll-back in case an OTA update was unsuccessful.
Suffice to say, security is of paramount importance, leading to the introduction of the ISO 21434 standard, which was expressly defined to address cyber security for automotive applications. This standard focuses on design methodologies used to design, test, and verify the design of memory and storage to guard against malicious attack. SDVs are designed expressly with OTA in mind, so state-of-the art security is paramount. An emerging branch of cybersecurity referred to as post-quantum computing (PQC) threatens to disrupt the current security landscape in just a few short years. This too will need to be given careful consideration to avoid malicious attacks and will again require state-of-the-art technologies in the vehicle down the road.
Continuing to look at the trajectory of automotive semiconductor storage technologies, because the SDV is driving a centralized architecture, the aggregation of all storage in one singular location leads to a more efficient means to support OTA updates in addition to increased overall board area and efficiency. An example of such efficiency that can be realized through centralized storage is illustrated by sharing such maps between advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). ADAS uses map data to navigate the roadways to get to the desired location, whereas the IVI system uses map data to display to the driver and passenger exactly where the vehicle is on the given roadway or to enter the desired location.
Centralized storage devices such as single root I/O virtualized (SR-IOV) SSDs allow for access to a common storage area from multiple different sources while providing hardware isolation, preventing user-downloaded applications from affecting mission critical code. Here again, SR-IOV represents some of the state of the art in storage technologies that are being employed in today’s automobile.
In part two, I’ll discuss how two more use cases—functional safety and context-aware navigation powered by multi-modal generative AI—are driving further innovation in memory and storage technologies.
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