STMicroelectronics announces functional details for multi-application, deterministic vehicle gauge level MCUS

STMicroelectronics has announced further product details for its innovative Stellar family of automotive microcontrollers, explaining how the new microcontrollers ensure the operational reliability and certainty of multiple independent real-time applications, one of the most critical challenges facing the automotive industry today. The complexity of the new automotive architecture requires the consolidation of multiple independent applications into a powerful, highly integrated MCU, and often involves a choice between determinism and virtualization. Stellar can do both.

The pioneer of this new controller, Stellar's highly integrated MCUS deliver superior computing power that dramatically simplifies the parallel deterministic operation of multi-source software while ensuring the highest security and processing performance. These capabilities meet the system requirements for the electrical/electronic (E/E) architecture of next-generation connected vehicles. To this end, Stellar introduced new features such as state-of-the-art hardware support for virtualized processors, quality of service Settings, peripheral isolation, and resource isolation at the chip interconnect level. These features ensure that software functional isolation does not interfere with each other and is safe, and independent application software or virtual ECU electronic control units can coexist on the same MCU chip, supporting the simultaneous existence of multiple ASIL security levels.

STMicroelectronics has partnered with Bosch, a renowned tier 1 supplier of automotive electronics modules, to develop this new technology to meet future integration needs of OEM customers.

Axel Aue, Vice President of Bosch, said: "We define Stellar's capabilities as overcoming integration challenges while remaining isolated from each other. The computational performance of this system is excellent, and the performance of phase-change memory is equal to or even exceeds that of flash memory technology. In addition, Stellar's over-the-Air Firmware Update (FOTA) performance is flawless, with no shutdown and no recovery process."

Luca Rodeschini, General Manager of Strategy & Automotive Processors and RF Products at STMicroelectronics, said: "We have designed Stellar to meet the needs of future automotive domain/region architectures and service-oriented communications, setting aggressive targets in terms of real-time performance, security and certainty. Bosch's product feature definition, evaluation and validation is expert confirmation of our team's ability to integrate outstanding real-time performance, embedded PCM non-volatile memory and full virtualization to ensure effective software isolation and improve vehicle safety and convenience."

Further Technical Information. Further technical information

Stellar has a built-in Arm® Cortex-R52 multi-core processor, with some cores running in lock-step mode and others in split core mode, and features a 2-level memory protection unit and a low-latency universal interrupt controller. The new MCU is suitable for hard real-time applications that meet ASIL-D, the highest safety integrity level of the automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262. The new product also includes several powerful accelerators for secure data routing, data processing and computing capabilities, supporting advanced security features and a variety of communication command and control.

This highly integrated MCU uses Virtual Machine ID(VMID) at the network on chip and memory level to provide a full range of virtualization capabilities covering multiple layers. Firewalls ensure complete isolation at the level of all chip interconnects, including peripherals. These firewalls enable Stellar to manage virtual machine (VM) access and priority to externals, ensuring that all mission-critical functions operate in isolation.

With its unique architecture and hardware virtualization capabilities, Stellar ensures safe application operation with a distract-free approach. The hardware approach has significant advantages over software virtualization, including a reduced task load on the processor core and the impact of virtualization on memory.

At the same time, by making better use of its own hardware resources, Stellar solves the growing software complexity and integration challenge at a lower cost than the combined overhead of multiple independent ECUs that each perform internal management and handle latency associated with the communication protocol stack. In fact, Stellar can support multiple real-time operating systems (OSes) to operate independently without interfering with each other. These real-time operating systems can separately manage applications with different levels of functional safety. Stellar's processing performance is excellent, leveraging AESdedicated accelerators to handle Ethernet or CAN bus communication encryption algorithms, reducing the load on the main hardware security modules (HSM) used for MCASec, IPSec, and CAN validation.

Stellar's highly integrated MCU integrates a non-volatile Phase change memory (PCM). PCM has fast reading speed and single-bit modifability that flash memory does not have, ensuring that over-the-air (OTA) does not shut down updates, even if the entire memory is updated, there is no need to shut down. In addition to greater upgrade flexibility and more erase times, single-bit dynamic modification during run (no erasing required) eliminates single-bit errors by refreshing bits, expanding security Settings, and extending memory life.

In terms of high temperature read and write operation reliability, radiation curing, erasability and data retention, ST developed and tested embedded phase change memory technology according to the most stringent requirements of automotive applications. The embedded phase change memory ePCM meets the requirements of automotive AEC-Q100 Grade 0 with a maximum operating temperature of + 165°C.