NXP Semiconductors, one of the world’s largest supplier of automotive semiconductors, has announced a new family of high-performance safe microprocessors to control vehicle dynamics in next-generation electric and autonomous vehicles.

The new NXP S32S microprocessors will manage the systems that accelerate, brake and steer vehicles safely, whether under the direct control of a driver or an autonomous vehicle’s control. It is considered as the first use of the new Arm Cortex-R52 for multi-core ASIL D (Automotive safety Integrity level D) computing, one of the highest classifications for initial hazards.

Ian Riches, executive director in the strategy analytics global automotive practice said, “A car can be extremely intelligent, but if it can’t act safely on a decision, you don’t have a reliable autonomous system at all.” 

NXP claims that it has met the needs of carmakers developing future autonomous and hybrid electric vehicles with the newly available 800MHz microprocessor/microcontroller. Furthermore, the first of the new S32 product lines, the S32S microprocessors offer one of the highest performance ever. The processors are built for both premium and volume-based automotive brands. It has a unified architecture of microcontrollers/microprocessors (MCU/MPU) and an identical software environment that can reduce development effort and maximise software reuse across products and applications. It also comes with a large integrated flash memory (up to 64M bytes) supporting on-the-fly, over-the-air update capability with zero processor downtime 

The NXP S32S processors use an array of the new Arm Cortex-R52 cores, which integrate one of the highest levels of safety features of any Arm processor. The array offers four fully independent ASIL D capable processing paths to support parallel safe computing. In addition, the S32S architecture supports a new “fail availability” capability, allowing the device to continue to operate after detecting and isolating a failure – a critical capability for future autonomous applications.

NXP has partnered with OpenSynergy to develop a fully featured, real-time hypervisor supporting the NXP S32S products. OpenSynergy’s COQOS Micro SDK is claimed to be one of the first hypervisor platforms that take advantage of the Arm Cortex-R52’s special hardware features. It enables the integration of multiple real-time operating systems onto microcontrollers requiring high levels of safety (up to ISO26262 ASIL D). COQOS Micro SDK provides secure, safe and fast context switching ahead of today’s software-only solutions in traditional microcontrollers.

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