Embedded World 2024: Micron unveils platforms to power in-vehicle AI

As the electrification of the automotive industry continues at great pace, transforming all aspects of the sector’s ecosystem, memory and storage solutions provider Micron Technology has made its latest move in the software-defined vehicle area by qualifying a full suite of automotive-grade memory and storage solutions for the Qualcomm Technologies Snapdragon Digital Chassis cloud-connected platform.

Snapdragon Digital Chassis is designed to allow automakers to meet evolving consumer and enterprise demand for a connected, intelligent experience that is safer, smarter and more immersive. At the same time, the technology is seeing use in examining opportunities for deeper customer engagement and service-based business models on the foundation of a scalable hardware-software co-designed architecture.

The work between Micron and Qualcomm Technologies is aimed at helping the ecosystem build next-generation intelligent vehicles powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI).

It will see Micron’s low-power double data rate 5X (LPDDR5X) memory, Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 3.1, Xccela flash memory and quad serial peripheral interface NOR (SPI-NOR) flash pre-integrated into the latest generation of Snapdragon automotive solutions and modules. These include the Snapdragon Cockpit Platform, Snapdragon Ride Platform and Snapdragon Ride Flex System-on-Chip (SoC), all of which are intended to handle the increasing requirements of modern and future workloads for AI technologies.

Used by leading automakers, Micron said its automotive solutions have accumulated trillions of miles on the road over the company’s nearly 35 years in the automotive market. The company believes its deep expertise stems from tight collaboration with automotive customers on designing memory into evolving architectures underpinning cutting-edge automotive technologies.

“Today’s software-defined vehicles and immersive cockpits require highly reliable, ultra-low-latency memory and storage to process massive amounts of data at the edge and enable time-critical near-instant decision-making,” said Chris Jacobs, vice-president of Micron’s embedded market segments.

“Our broad portfolio of automotive memory and storage solutions provides the instant-on performance required on the road, and we’re thrilled to work with Qualcomm Technologies to accelerate ecosystem adoption of the leading-edge solutions designed to make vehicles safer and smarter,” added Jacobs.

Micron automotive-grade products are described as being “uniquely” ruggedised, built and optimised to meet demanding automotive standards through its process technology and product development. It said its automotive products are rigorously tested to provide the extreme stability, quality, thermal tolerances, reliability and longevity the automotive market requires.

In terms of deployment for Qualcomm’s automotive customers and within the broader ecosystem, Micron solutions have been enabled in all the volatile and non-volatile memory sockets of the latest-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms. The companies’ work is said to build on a long-standing relationship that spans multiple generations of platforms to bring immersive in-vehicle experiences to cars.

The Micron offer is headed by the LPDDR5X flagship memory solution. Said to be built for applications needing the fastest speeds and lowest power profile, it is seeing use to improve energy efficiency and performance for intelligent vehicles with increasingly bandwidth- and energy-hungry technologies such as AI-based autonomous driving features. The LPDDR5X is backwards-compatible for LPDDR5 speeds of 6.4Gbps, for which Qualcomm Technologies has qualified the memory, and latest generation Qualcomm Snapdragon automotive SoCs are the first SoC family enabling the LPDDR5 interface.

The Qualcomm announcement comes hot on the heels of Micron unveiling its 4150AT SSD at Embedded World 2024. Said to offer first-of-its-kind virtualisation and four customisable ports, the automotive-grade drive is designed to enable a new paradigm of centralised architectures for intelligent vehicles.