AUTONOMOUS & CONNECTED VEHICLES
Flash memory keeps cars connected A new kind of flash memory is optimized specifically to handle the hostile environment imposed on electronics in vehicular uses. You’d have to say the NAND flash memory had an inauspicious beginning. Invented in 1987 by Toshiba, the first NAND flash chip didn’t sell until 1995 when it finally found a spot in digital answering machines. Toshiba insiders say the company almost killed the project twice. When the technology finally made a commercial debut, it was in the form of a 4-Mbit part that went for a mere $10 per megabit. Today, the same die area that held a 4-Mbit flash part in 1995 can hold 1.33 trillion bits, a factor of 333,000-times denser than the first part. And the price has dropped to two-hundredths of a cent per megabit, or about 20 cents per gigabit. Meanwhile, the NAND flash market has grown to something north of $60 billion as of last year thanks largely to applications ranging from digital cameras to cellphones. Meanwhile, industry analysts figure the NAND flash market is growing at a rate of about 40% annually and will continue to do so thanks to demand in uses such as data centers, servers, smartphones, tablets, and PCs.
LELAND TESCHLER | EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Interestingly, uses in connected vehicles don’t constitute much of the projected demand – yet. That’s about to change with the rise of ADAS technology and autonomous piloting functions. Analysts figure the average autonomous vehicle will generate data at the rate of 4 terabytes per day, and a lot of that data will be uploaded to the cloud. Much of it will necessarily sit in flash memory chips residing both on vehicles and in data centers. The upshot of these trends is a boom time for flash chips that can handle the special needs of vehicles.
GOING FOR A RIDE Automakers are notorious for their penny pinching on components. In the case of flash memory, they have an advantage in the cost area: smartphones are one of the biggest uses for flash chips, and there some 1.5 billion smartphones sold annually. Memory suppliers say that huge volume can help them keep down costs of flash chip destined for automotive use because there are a lot of commonalities between the memory chips deployed in both applications.
JEDEC UFS & MIPI unipro Block diagram and overview RST_n
UIC
Rx0 D+/Tx1 D+/Rx1 D+/-
MIPI unipro
MIPI MP HY
MIPI MP HY
MIPI unipro
DESIGN WORLD — EE NETWORK
Toshiba — A&CV HB 08-19_v2.indd 44
UIC
Tx0 D+/-
RMMI IF
44
UFS DEVICE
REF_CLK
UFS HOST
RMMI IF
8 • 2019
A diagram from the MIPI Alliance shows that in UFS v3.0, MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface) M-PHY v4.1 and UniPro (for Unified Protocol) v1.8 form the UFS Interconnect Layer (UIC) that connects a UFS host with a UFS storage device. M-PHY is the physical layer and UniPro forms the link layer. These two layers communicate over RMMI (Reference M-PHY MODULE Interface) and can support two transmit and two receive lanes.
eeworldonline.com | designworldonline.com
8/8/19 8:32 AM
