Automotive processors are the larger chips in a car that run its digital dashboard, its driver-assistance features and the network that joins its many small controllers. A car has dozens of electronic control units (ECUs), small computers that each do one job, such as braking or the windows, each with its own microcontroller. Automotive processors are much bigger. They are closer to a phone's system-on-chip, with several processor cores, a graphics engine and often an AI engine on one chip.
There are three main kinds. A cockpit processor runs the digital cockpit: the screen behind the steering wheel and the touch screen in the middle of the dashboard. Its graphics engine is often a licensed design; see GPU and NPU IP. An ADAS processor reads the cameras and radar and decides when to warn, brake or steer, for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). A gateway or zone controller joins the car's networks. Older parts of the car exchange short messages over a CAN bus, a shared wire that carries about 500 kilobits a second. Cameras and screens need automotive Ethernet, which carries 100 megabits to 1 gigabit a second or more. The gateway passes messages between these networks and blocks messages that should not cross.
A car chip must meet harder rules than a phone chip. It must work from about −40 °C to over 100 °C, survive vibration, and keep working for 15 years or more. Chips for braking and steering must also follow ISO 26262, the international standard for functional safety. Under it, the chip must detect its own faults and fall back to a safe state. Each chip is tested for years before a carmaker approves it.
Imagine an SUV made in India, driving at 80 km/h on the Yamuna Expressway with adaptive cruise control on. Adaptive cruise control keeps a set speed and a safe gap to the car ahead. The front camera sends 30 pictures a second to the ADAS processor. The car ahead brakes hard. In the next picture, about 33 thousandths of a second later, the processor's AI engine finds that the gap is closing fast. The processor checks the radar: the car ahead is 22 metres away, and the gap is shrinking by 8 metres every second. That would close the gap in under 3 seconds. The processor sends a brake command over the car's network to the brake controller. The SUV starts braking about 0.2 seconds after the car ahead, and the dashboard flashes a warning to the driver.
The control logic for such features is often designed as a model and turned into code with model-based design tools. The processor's power supply and the motors it commands depend on power semiconductors. Carmakers are now moving from dozens of separate ECUs to a few powerful processors, each running many functions, which makes these chips more important in every new model.