Dual core architectures in automotive SoCs

Amit Goel & Ankur Sharma, Freescale Semiconductor
EETimes,  8/23/2010 2:17 PM EDT

Automotive SoCs have traditionally been single core, since not much computational work or high end applications were targeted on them. Automotives were simpler, so were the applications and so were the SoCs. As more and more electronics made room in the automotives, the complexity of the SoCs kept on increasing. Now the focus is to have most of the automotive under electronic control.

High end automotives produced these days provide features like electronic stability control (ESC), traction control system (TCS), advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) etc. These features require complex SoCs at heart which can collect, process and transfer data at a fast rate from multiple peripherals.

No matter at how much high frequency the single core is operating on, it will always have performance bottlenecks & challenges while performing multiple tasks. Single core running on higher frequency consumes more power. This makes the single core architecture unfit for ultra low power applications. Dual core based SOC architecture provide better tradeoff in performance and power consumption than single core based architectures.

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