According to a report from Electronic Enthusiasts Network (by Liang Haobin), under the trend of automotive intelligence, smart driving and smart cockpits have become the core of automotive product innovation. To meet these innovative demands, in addition to computing hardware and sensors, the dashboard HMI has also received increasing attention.
HMI stands for Human Machine Interface, which refers to the means of information exchange between users and devices, serving as an interface for information exchange and dialogue between humans and computers. The forms of HMI can vary widely; early automotive dashboards primarily used mechanical gauges, including speedometers, tachometers, oil pressure gauges, water temperature gauges, fuel gauges, and charging gauges, along with various indicator lights.
With the development of display technology, dashboards have gradually incorporated more electrified components, transitioning from early vacuum fluorescent displays to LCDs and OLEDs. Currently, many models still utilize a combination of mechanical and digital gauges in their HMI design, such as using mechanical pointers for speed and engine RPM while displaying vehicle information on LCD screens.
In recent years, fully virtual dashboards have been gradually popularized in vehicles, where all dashboard information is displayed on screens. Around 2012, Tesla was the first to implement a fully liquid crystal dashboard in its cars, aggressively eliminating most physical buttons in the cockpit in favor of full touch control. Subsequently, Audi introduced its new virtual cockpit technology in 2015, featuring a fully liquid crystal dashboard located behind the steering wheel, which allows for multiple display modes through the operating system, such as immersive navigation.
With the emergence of smart driving, the SR interface has become a focal point of competition among major automotive manufacturers. The so-called SR (Sense Reality) refers to the perception of the real environment around the vehicle through its sensors, which is graphically displayed on the automotive HMI screen.
For smart driving, the significance of the SR interface lies in enabling users to better perceive the capability boundaries of the vehicle itself, allowing users to understand the differences between what they see with their own eyes and what the vehicle’s sensors perceive. This helps users better grasp the use of smart driving features and enhances their confidence in utilizing these functions.
As smart driving has not yet reached full automation, human-machine co-driving will remain a key application scenario for smart driving in the long term; therefore, the SR interface will be an important development direction in the future.
Of course, the SR interface requires high 3D rendering capabilities and sensor perception abilities, making it an important marker for showcasing the intelligence of electric vehicles, clearly demonstrating the differences between smart and traditional cars.
Thus, it can be seen that automotive HMI systems are actually divided into two main parts: the hardware part includes the CPU and GPU responsible for task scheduling and real-time rendering; storage components like DRAM, NAND FLASH, and NOR FLASH; transmission interfaces like SPI/UART and LVDS; and safety modules including ASIL-D functional safety level MCUs.
The software part currently includes common automotive HMI operating systems such as QNX, Linux, Android, and HarmonyOS. However, due to the functional safety requirements of automobiles, operating systems often come in various combinations, such as QNX + Android and Linux + Android.
MCU Demand for Automotive HMI
Currently, many mid-to-high-end smart cars use high-performance single-chip SoCs or MPUs to achieve HMI displays for the central control and dashboards; additionally, many low-cost HMI platforms use MCUs as the computing core.
For the mainstream digital dashboards today, due to the high graphical display requirements of HMIs, MCUs that previously only supported 2D graphical displays can no longer meet the demand for graphical rendering. Therefore, in recent years, MCU manufacturers have begun to launch MCU products specifically for automotive HMI applications, which include more powerful graphics accelerators.
For example, Infineon launched the new TRAVEO T2G Cluster series automotive MCUs in December 2023, equipped with a proprietary graphics accelerator that enables the creation of dashboards, in-car infotainment, and cockpit systems with MPU performance at MCU costs.
The T2G-C series MCUs come with an optimized 2.5D graphics engine that supports a fully virtual dashboard with a resolution of 1920×1080. This graphics engine can reduce the memory required for graphics processing by three to five times, thereby lowering power consumption and costs. Additionally, the TRAVEO T2G CYT4EN is equipped with a 320 MHz dual Arm Cortex-M7F core and 6MB of embedded flash memory, along with LPDDR4 and eMMC interfaces, enabling the display of complex 3D scenes, providing greater design freedom for HMIs.
In March of this year, domestic MCU manufacturer Xianji Semiconductor also launched the new generation digital instrument display and human-machine interface system application platform—the HPM6800 series. The HPM6800 series MCUs are equipped with a 600 MHz RISC-V CPU core, achieving a computing power of 1710 DMIPS. In terms of graphical performance, this series adopts the high-performance 2.5D OpenVG GPU from Chip Origin, supporting the OpenVG Lite graphics library and 2D graphical acceleration PDMA, with 1MB of built-in RAM, supporting DDR2/DDR3/DDR3L interfaces, and integrating two sets of 4 Lane MIPI-DSI/LVDS-Tx display interfaces and two sets of 2 Lane MIPI-CSI/LVDS-Rx camera interfaces.
As an MCU for automotive HMI applications, the HPM6800 integrates efficient graphics processing, complex human-machine interfaces, and real-time signal control, maximizing system performance to achieve high-performance HMI displays with a single-chip MCU while also offering easy development, low startup time, and low system power consumption.
In low-cost automotive HMI applications, MCUs remain one of the mainstream choices. The evolution of automotive HMI drives the iterative upgrade of related upstream chip products. For MCU products used in automotive HMI applications, including dashboards and CMS, stronger GPU support will be required; in the future, more MCUs with high-performance GPUs may emerge in the market.
Disclaimer: This article is originally from Electronic Enthusiasts. Please indicate the source when reprinting. For group discussions, please add WeChat elecfans999, for submission or interview requests, please email [email protected].
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