Accelerating the Next Wave of Automotive Applications

With the increasing mandates for and adoption of hybrid and electric vehicles (EV), the demand for automotive applications development from power management maximizing battery life, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for infotainment systems that support technologies like voice control and gesture recognition features are growing significantly.

Car manufacturers are exploring the use of in-cabin vision systems and AI for a variety of use cases. Some examples include

• Monitoring a driver for drowsiness, inattention, or impairment
• Monitoring passengers (e.g., ensuring children and/or pets aren’t inadvertently left alone in the car) and objects (e.g., ensuring items like bags, phones, and wallets aren’t unintentionally left in the vehicle)
• AI-powered external vision systems used to support ADAS and autonomous driving features.

At the same time, vehicles are also becoming increasingly connected, with many of today’s automobiles being vehicle-to-everything (V2X) or 5G-enabled, where manufacturers are required to adopt local regulatory safety requirements to maintain data privacy and cybersecurity.

This continued technological advancement of the automotive industry makes us excited to announce the expansion of our advanced general purpose FPGA family with the introduction of Lattice CertusPro™-NX Automotive FPGAs. Delivering AEC-Q100 qualified advanced system bandwidth and memory capabilities paired with leadership power efficiency and performance, in a smallest-in-class form factor, CertusPro-NX Automotive FPGAs are ideal for applications including high-speed video connectivity for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, high-speed up-to 5GbE in-vehicle networking (IVN), and sensor data processing in ADAS.

Highlighted areas are targeted for CertusPro-NX Automotive

Built on the award-winning Lattice Nexus™ platform, the CertusPro-NX family offers leadership power efficiency, the highest bandwidth in the smallest form factor in comparison to similar devices, and are the only FPGAs in their class with support for LPDDR4 external memory. The CertusPro-NX Automotive family supports up to 8.1 Gbps SERDES, up to 96k logic cells (LCs), and efficient processing enabled by the most on-chip memory resources in their class.

With its high speed SERDES support, the CertusPro-NX Automotive family also adds unique features supporting bridging video inputs from infotainment SoCs, as well as image quality enhancements including local dimming and other video processing directly into the FPGA supporting embedded display port. This device family allows customers to offload video enhancement while adding more connectivity capabilities to a system, as shown below.

Safety and security applications require the use of electronic components using authentication and encryption to protect against cyberattacks. To protect their bitstreams against unauthorized access, CertusPro-NX FPGAs support AES-256 encryption and elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) bitstream authentication.

These features and benefits of CertusPro-NX FPGAs are now AEC-Q100 qualified and available for Automotive manufacturers. AEC-Q100 qualification, in addition to its inherent reliability (up to 100X better soft-error rate (SER) performance compared to similar competing FPGAs), makes CertusPro-NX Automotive FPGAs ideal for use in challenging Automotive environments.

CertusPro-NX Automotive FPGAs provide features and performance levels that exceed those of similar competing FPGAs, including:

• Best-in-class power efficiency
  • Up to 4X lower power compared to similar competing FPGAs
• Higher performance interfaces
  • Up to 2X the total SERDES bandwidth compared to similar competing FPGAs
  • Up to 8.1 Gbps SERDES support
  • Fast device configuration under 30 ms
  • Only FPGA in class with LPDDR4 external memory support
• Highest reliability and device security
  • Up to 100X lower soft error rate compared to similar competing FPGAs
  • Integrated bitstream security for added reliability
• Class-leading compact form factor
  • Up to 6.5X smaller than competing devices with SERDES enables efficient Automotive designs
• Easy-to-use design software support
  • Lattice Radiant® software tool support helps simplify and accelerate automotive system design

CertusPro-NX Automotive FPGAs are supported by our intuitive and easy-to-use design tools including the Lattice Radiant® 3.2.1 August 2022 release, and an ISO® 26262 compliance is planned for future release. These tools are complemented by Lattice Propel™, a design environment with a complete set of graphical and command-line tools that can be used to create, analyze, compile, and debug both the hardware design of an FPGA-based processor system and the software designed for it.

CertusPro-NX Automotive FPGAs are also supported by the Lattice mVision™, Lattice Automate™ and Lattice sensAI™ solution stacks. This means designers can leverage the stacks’ modular hardware platforms, reference designs, neural network IP cores, and custom design services to accelerate the design of automotive vision systems and AI applications to help simplify the design process and speed time to market.

Lattice also offers highly reliable, low power FPGAs optimized for use in Automotive applications including:

• Lattice CrossLink™ FPGAs for high-speed video and sensor automotive applications,
• Lattice Mach™ FGPAs for platform management and security applications in automotive designs, and
• Lattice Certus™-NX FPGAs for automotive lighting, infotainment, and telematics.

To learn more about solutions for next generation Automotive applications from Lattice, visit the Lattice Automotive Application page.

Learn how you can outpace market expectations with Lattice FPGAs and solutions by reaching out to us today!