Infineon Technologies (Korea CEO Seung-soo Lee) announced its ambition to maintain its leading position in next-generation automotive fields, such as silicon carbide (SiC), software-defined vehicles, and autonomous driving, with advanced technology. As part of this, they unveiled LPDDR flash memory and announced that it supports the implementation of next-generation automotive architectures.

Infineon held a press conference at Lotte Hotel World in Jamsil on the 9th and announced next-generation automotive trends, Infineon Automotive Solutions, and Infineon Flash Memory Solutions.

Choi Jae-hong, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Infineon Korea, who took the stage first, expressed confidence that Infineon is a global leader in semiconductors. He stated that the company is currently pursuing decarbonization and digitalization as growth trends and, befitting its position as the No. 1 automotive semiconductor manufacturer, possesses all the microcontrollers, sensors, and power-related semiconductors for electric vehicles.

In particular, forecasting that the future market will be led by silicon carbide (SiC), the company is expanding its factories to increase silicon carbide production capacity and expressed confidence that its automotive SiC semiconductor technology is superior to that of its competitors.

In addition, regarding autonomous driving, they stated that while they have LiDAR solutions, they are focusing on advancing radar solutions and are preparing an application that can supply 4D information output by radar.

At the same time, through the new architecture of software-defined vehicles, it was mentioned that although it is currently ranked first in the automotive MCU sector, it is not satisfied with this and will make efforts to further develop in the future.

In this regard, Vice President Choi Jae-hong stated that software-defined vehicles inevitably require a change in electrical and electronic architecture, predicting that while existing ECUs have currently reached the domain architecture stage, they will evolve to a mixed domain/zone architecture and eventually a full car computer.

In domain architecture, the body domain will be separated to reduce wires and decrease weight, evolving into zone architecture, and ultimately serving as the center of all functions in the future. It was predicted that it would go up to a full car computer where a high-performance computer controls the center, six regional controllers receive sensors, and control commands from the central computer.

Infineon is making efforts to proactively respond to these changes in automotive electrical and electronic architectures and to supply optimal semiconductors, and the LPDDR flash memory announced this time is one such effort.

Regarding LPDDR flash memory, Linus Wong, Director of Product Management for Infineon Flash Solutions, made the announcement. He unveiled the SEMPER X1 LPDDR flash memory (hereinafter SEMPER X1), the industry's first LPDDR flash memory supporting the implementation of next-generation automotive E/E architectures, stating that it meets both the performance and density requirements of domain and zone controllers.

Linus Wong stated, “While LPDDR and Flash themselves existed, LPDDR Flash, which combines LPDDR and Flash, is being introduced for the first time by Infineon,” adding, “The Infineon SEMPER X1 is currently in the sampling stage, will be officially commercialized in 2024, and will be produced at UMC Foundry.”

The SEMPER X1 LPDDR unveiled today provides safety, reliability, and real-time code execution capabilities that are critical to the automotive domain and zone controllers.

In the automotive market evolving beyond Zone Architecture to Full Car ComputersIt is becoming increasingly dependent on state-of-the-art multi-core processors developed in advanced manufacturing processes.

In response to the above demand, Infineon developed the SEMPER X1, which features an LPDDR4 interface operating at 3.2 GB per second and a multi-bank architecture.

It delivers 8 times better performance than existing NOR flash memory and is 20 times faster in random read transactions, making it useful for real-time applications.

In addition, Infineon SEMPER X1 has a training time 100 times faster than DRAM, demonstrating excellent performance when systems such as airbags need to operate.

In particular, using this memory in SDVs (Software Defined Vehicles) enables the implementation of advanced features with enhanced safety and architectural flexibility, and because it is a multi-bank architecture, it also supports OTA firmware updates without downtime.

Linus Wong stated, “LPDDR flash cannot replace NOR flash because its applications differ, and it is also a different field from NAND flash, which is specialized in power density and capacity,” adding, “It is expected to grow stably as it has less market volatility compared to NOR and NAND flash.”