Bringing rich graphics to automotive market

Embedded solutions provider, Cypress Semiconductor, has announced that global automotive supplier Yazaki North America has implemented Cypress’ instrument cluster solution to drive the advanced graphics in its instrument cluster for a leading American car manufacturer.

Yazaki selected Cypress based on its unique offering of five chips that combine to drive dual displays and provide instant-on memory performance with automotive-grade, ASIL-B safety compliance. The Cypress solution is based on a Traveo microcontroller (MCU), along with two high-bandwidth HyperBus memories in a multi-chip package (MCP), an analog power management IC (PMIC) for safe electrical operation, and a PSoC MCU for system management support.

“Our customer wanted an instrument cluster with rich graphics that would enhance the user experience for drivers and help differentiate their high-end crossover and truck models,” said Spencer Weidig, Senior Program Manager at Yazaki. “Working with a single, devoted supplier such as Cypress for multiple core components allowed for a cost-effective system solution and simplified the design process for this instrument cluster, which has been well received. The solution’s scalability helped us address three different vehicle levels efficiently.”

Sven Natus, Senior Director of the Automotive Business Unit at Cypress, stated: “As a company with deep automotive knowledge and technology expertise, Cypress has strived to stay ahead of the industry with high-performance, fail-safe automotive solutions. We take a long-term view of our collaboration with automotive suppliers such as Yazaki, offering them tailored solutions based on our broad portfolio of Traveo microcontrollers and leveraging our best-in-class fail-safe storage and data-logging, power management ICs and other technologies for added convenience.”

Cypress’ Traveo devices in the Yazaki instrument cluster were reportedly the industry’s first 3D-capable Arm Cortex-R5 cluster MCUs, and they claim to provide greater memory savings, increased safety features and rich image capabilities. The MCU works seamlessly with Cypress’ HyperBus MCP device, which combines a high-speed, 512-Mbit NOR Flash device for fast-boot, instant-on capability and a 64-Mbit self-refresh DRAM for expanded scratchpad memory.

The MCP enables bandwidth-intensive processing with low latency, and its low pin count simplifies designs compared to complex Double Data Rate (DDR) memories.