April 14, 2014, Seoul, South Korea — High-end automotive instrument panels typically contain several external components, including a main processor, graphics unit, external SRAM, and dedicated circuitry for managing head-up display warping and other sophisticated functions. Due to the cost and complexity of integrating these various parts, these features were previously applied only to luxury vehicles.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a single-chip solution consisting of three cores that provides more than 1.7 times higher performance than all existing automotive instrument panel MCUs, designed to expand head-up displays and other high-quality graphics features from luxury vehicles to mid-range and entry-level models. This high-performance solution eliminates the need for expensive additional processors and memory chips.

In addition, the triple-core MAC57D5xx helps enhance safety by separating key instrument panel hardware and software through the simultaneous operation of separate operating systems on each of the device's three cores. Operating the AutoSAR OS independently on the ARM Cortex-M4 core and the graphics OS on the ARM Cortex-A5 core can enhance safety in next-generation instrument panel designs.

Ray Cornyn, Vice President of Product Management and International Marketing for Freescale’s Automotive MCU Business Unit, stated, “With automotive system integration reaching all-time highs, OEMs and suppliers are focusing on integrating massive amounts of driver information on dashboards and enhancing graphics quality while maintaining safety and security as top priorities. Building on Freescale’s long tradition of automotive innovation, our next-generation dashboard microcontrollers provide a secure single-chip solution for processing massive amounts of automotive information, offering high-resolution graphics and scalability to meet future requirements.”

Advanced cluster graphic design traditionally requires resource-intensive software development and complex toolchains. Freescale offers a more streamlined approach that leverages proprietary IP and optimized code to use resources more efficiently and shorten time-to-market.

Samples of the MAC57D5xx DIS MCU are scheduled to be available starting in June 2014.