The Hardware Rethink: How ChipFlow Empowers Established Engineering Teams
In the fast-paced world of technology, established practices often clash with the drive for innovation. Demanding timescales and long ingrained processes means that the path of least resistance is often the one taken.
Established engineering teams (in particular for the automotive & aerospace sectors) have long relied on proven methods and, often, off-the-shelf solutions. And for the most part this hasn’t presented much of a problem. However, as the world continues to move toward a greater software defined approach, the need for companies to differentiate their offering has grown.
The question is: How can organizations move beyond the well established ways and introduce cost effective and optimised solutions without disrupting stability?
A - Understanding the Landscape
The Culture of Stability
It is in human nature to aim for stability and to fight against change. However, this desire for stability has stifled innovation. While these solutions meet immediate and pressing needs, they often lack the adaptability and scalability required to address future challenges. Current Automotive market trends such as; electrification, autonomous driving, zonal architectures, and software-defined vehicles require customized hardware solutions for OEMs to stay competitive in the face of increasing competition and rising supplier costs. This reticence to change has already seen a number of legacy brands and providers lag behind more agile competitors.
‘It is OK to keep adding hardware’
Another trait of human nature is that it is easier to add than to erase and change. As products have become more complex over the last decades, the prevailing mentality has been to keep adding hardware to meet the new requirements rather than think through the most optional overall architecture for the need. This has worked well until the ever connected, software driven architecture needs have made adding further hardware increasingly difficult.
B - Why is a change needed?
The Cost of Staying Static
As the technology landscape evolves, relying solely on off-the-shelf solutions limits opportunities for market differentiation. Offering tailored products allows companies to better meet market demands. The longer organizations wait to innovate, the harder it becomes to catch up. In the automotive context, for the OEMs who miss the opportunity to progress swiftly in their Zonal architecture transformation, the consequences can be existential.
The Challenge of Hardware Complexity
In today’s vehicles, the proliferation of ECUs (Electronic Control Units) has reached extraordinary levels. For example, some cars now feature as many as four ECUs within a single steering wheel, each containing its own MCU (Microcontroller Unit). When added up, the IC component list of the vehicle reaches into the thousands. This fragmented approach creates significant challenges, including higher costs, and complexity in system integration.
The need to reduce the overall silicon quantity in cars has become evident. Yet, the prevailing industry approach has been to simply add more hardware to address new functionality requirements. This method is simply unsustainable as it drives up the bill of materials and increases system inefficiencies.
C - How to become better at adjusting?
Opportunity around Zonal Architecture transformation
This approach consolidates multiple ECUs and MCUs into fewer, more powerful zones, reducing complexity and dependency. The benefits of which are clear and thus all OEMs are moving towards Zonal architectures:
· Consolidating functions into zonal controllers reduces the number of costly ECUs and MCUs scattered across the car.
· Lower silicon levels directly translate to a reduced bill of materials.
· Zonal architecture offers a more flexible platform for future technology integration.
The key question for Automotive players is how to best use the transformation to their competitive advantage - will they play it safe but risk being left behind or will they embrace the change in the hope to become a leader?
For most components, off-the-shelf solutions are sufficient. However, in a few critical areas, custom ASICs offer significant advantages.
In the case of central compute and high-end ADAS, high-quality, industry-grade tools are essential for custom design solutions.
For the broader transformation of their chip portfolio, which may include up to 2,000 chips across the entire vehicle, automotive companies should explore faster and more cost-effective options to reduce the costly silicon burden.
With the transition just one or two product lifecycles away, now is the time to start testing and prototyping.
Being open to new technologies / approaches - The Case for ChipFlow
ChipFlow is a new approach to designing Integrated Circuits. The platform has been designed to support Automotive companies to rapidly and cheaply design custom FPGAs and ASICs. The offering also includes a set of pre-integrated PDKs by our Supply Chain partners enabling direct access to turn the designs to chips. Through focus on leveraging mature process nodes, ChipFlow platform enables Automotive OEMs a faster IC design process. In 2024, after only a 4 month design process, ChipFlow tapedout successfully a 130nm test ASIC for an Automotive OEM.
ChipFlow streamlines hardware (HW) and software (SW) co-design by integrating tools and processes that enable collaboration between existing teams. ChipFlow allows teams to leverage their existing experience in software design and translate that into hardware design. A part of this is enabled by using Python for RTL design, whilst still being able to leverage full Verilog (or other language) 3rd IP offerings.
This approach mitigates risk compared to traditional ASIC design houses or EDA vendors, which require significant upfront investment and direction. Not to mention lengthy contracts. ChipFlow offers OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers a low-risk, low-cost entry point into custom hardware design.
The Road Ahead
With companies like Tesla, BYD & NIO already pushing the boundaries of innovation, the time to act is now. ChipFlow empowers established engineering teams to innovate without abandoning stability, offering the tools needed to reduce silicon dependencies, lower costs, and transition to zonal architectures.
Let us show you how our platform can enable innovation in your organization today.
