Freescale announces new high-end powertrain microcontroller; 3x performance of prior high-end unit
13 November 2012
Freescale Semiconductor announced the new 32-bit Qorivva MPC5777M multicore microcontroller (MCU), the latest advancement in its Qorivva product line. (Earlier post.) This advanced MCU family will help automakers worldwide address regional automotive fuel economy and safety trends by enabling a new generation of engine management solutions.
Automakers are under increasing pressure from both governments and consumers to improve overall fuel efficiency across their fleet and lower polluting emissions. This is achieved partly by increasingly tight computerized control of the complete engine combustion process.
With new fuel choices, and increasing safety demands primarily driven by electric vehicles, automakers need to address increasingly complex powertrain platforms. The Qorivva MPC5777M will help address these needs by powering traditional diesel and gasoline direct injection systems as well as hybrid electric and plug-in electric vehicles.
The MPC5777M MCU provides three times the performance of Freescale’s Qorivva MPC5674F MCU, which has the highest official performance benchmark score in the industry. By harnessing this level of performance, automakers can simultaneously improve fuel economy and lower emissions, Freescale suggests. The MCU, with its smart on-chip partitioning, allows virtually instantaneous switching between high-performance and low-power operations, reducing the load on an increasingly complex vehicle electrical system.
Functional safety and security are becoming increasingly important to automakers and system suppliers. The MPC5777M is the newest Freescale SafeAssure functional safety solution and has been defined and developed from the ground up to address the ISO 26262 standard. The MPC5777M allows functional safety technology and ASIL-D compliance to be included in this new generation of powertrain controller and several key features have been included in hardware to help developers create safe solutions.
With the tremendous amount of data streaming through today’s vehicles, security has become a necessity for automakers to protect their control systems from software attacks. The MPC5777M MCU offers a hardware security module (HSM), which can prevent a hacker from taking control of the engine control unit. In addition, tamper detection protects against unauthorized code changes, power modifications and emissions tampering, which can lead to potentially critical damages to the automotive systems.
To help customers bring their designs to market more quickly, Freescale provides comprehensive enablement solutions for powertrain development, including comprehensive software libraries and reference solutions with full software and hardware integration. Freescale also offers an extensive suite of advanced development tools from partners such as Green Hills and Lauterbach.
In addition to the Qorivva MPC5777M family, Freescale will make available the MPC5744K and MPC5746M families, based on the same Power Architecture technology. With this offering, Freescale now offers seamless scalability from 2.5 MB to 8 MB in memory, allowing customers to easily scale up or down as their product lines grow and diversify. Alpha samples of the MPC5777M MCU are available now. General market samples are planned for Q3 2013. Alpha samples of the MPC5744K are available now, with general market samples planned for availability in 2014.
New pressure sensors. Freescale Semiconductor is also adding three new pin-for-pin compatible pressure sensor replacements for the MPXHZ6000 family to its portfolio of Xtrinsic pressure sensors for automotive engine management and efficiency applications. The MPXHZ9000 absolute temperature compensated, piezo-resistive pressure sensors provide the same functionality as Freescale’s other integrated pressure sensors, while adding clipping functionality and the ability to customize for multiple end user applications.
Freescale’s latest MPXHZ9000 pressure sensors come with package porting and mounting options. The MPXHZ9115A is a non-ported sensor for fuel-injected car engines, motorbike and scooter engines and comfort seating and lumbar applications. The MPXHZ9400AC and MPXHZ9250AC are ported versions with tube attachments for applications such as alternative fuel or hybrid/electric vehicles, liquid propane gas (LPG) or remote sensing.
The MPXHZ9000 family of pressure sensors has two new distinct features: factory programmable output clipping and loss of supply/ground output diagnostics. The MPXHZ9000 family can be ordered with factory programmed ratio-metric clipping levels. In addition, these sensors are designed to detect loss of supply or loss of ground conditions and to signal the host controller with output levels outside of the normal operating range.
The MPXHZ9000 pressure sensors use a five-volt power supply and can sense pressure ranging from 15 - 400 kPa. The sensors are available in a durable thermoplastic eight-lead surface mount package that uses the same pin-out as existing MPXHZ6000 family pressure sensors for easy pin-for-pin compatible design with no board layout change required. In addition to Freescale’s proven sensor technology, customers benefit from the two-die solution and no laser trimming resulting in less test time. Additional products with pressure ranges from 15 to 400 kPa are planned to be added to the portfolio in the next year.
The MPXHZ9000 pressure sensors are sampling now, with full production planned for Q1 2013 at a suggested resale price starting at $3.50 (USD) in 10,000-piece quantities.
HCCI operation needs lots of computing power. I don't know if these new ECUs will have the requisite power but they have to move it closer to the needed power regime.
That is the next step in fuel economy increases.
Posted by: D | 13 November 2012 at 12:17 PM
This won't help fuel consumption as air and gasoline do not change and we cannot do any change on it. They cannot use more monitoring for the combustion as it is already well controlled by the previous generation of micro controllers. The micro controller is not a tool for more mpg. All it will do is drive the cost down for the micro controller, use less electricity so you will save one dollar each year and less weight so you will save another dollar each year on fuel costs.
Posted by: Gorr | 13 November 2012 at 01:51 PM
I disagree. HCCI is the hypothetical optimum combustion and efficiency in operation of an ICE. It use will save another 10-15% of fuel, which translates directly into better mpg.
But it needs enough fast computer sensors and computing power to be applied to each cyclinder independently, and to alter the decison for compression or spark ignition each cycle for each cylinder independently. That requires n times the number of cylinders in an engine when compared to most current ECUs.
As the combustion gets more optimum, ther i sless byproducts of inefficent combustion which must be cleanse aloowing the emissions equipement to be reduced in capacity and cost. that yields another savings. It is better to burn the fuel optimally, rather than to burn it inefficiently and waste energy to clean it up afterwards.
Posted by: D | 14 November 2012 at 11:16 AM