Automotive Head Unit
Next-generation automotive infotainment head unit system designs
The car infotainment system has evolved into a multi-faceted experience. Intelligent human-machine interfaces (HMI), such as smooth touch response, accurate voice recognition, and advanced gesture recognition have become one of the key determinants for customers when choosing a new car. Seamless connectivity is essential to keep people in touch – all day, every day. This is possible through wireless connections (Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth®) combined with cybersecurity measures to protect the privacy and defend vehicles from malicious attacks in the connected environment. In addition, a single USB-C cable now allows for charging and data transfer between the mobile device and the host system simultaneously.
Infineon’s broad product portfolio, including HMI controllers and sensors, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth® SoCs, USB-C controllers, security ICs, memory solutions, and power products, will take your design leap to the next generation and enable drivers and passengers to experience the most intuitive and comprehensive infotainment solution while maintaining a robust car connection.
Broad and scalable products for head unit system designs
The head unit system has evolved into a multi-faceted experience. Intelligent human-machine interfaces (HMI), such as smooth touch response, accurate voice recognition, and advanced gesture recognition have become one of the key determinants for customers when choosing a new car. Seamless connectivity is essential to keep people in touch – all day, every day. This is possible through wireless connections (cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth®) combined with cybersecurity measures to protect privacy and defend vehicles from malicious attacks in the connected environment. In addition, a single USB-C cable now allows for simultaneous charging and data transfer between the mobile device and the host system. Infineon’s broad product portfolio, including HMI controllers and sensors, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® SoCs, USB-C controllers, security ICs, memory solutions, and power products, will take your design leap to the next generation and enable drivers and passengers to experience the most intuitive and comprehensive infotainment solution while maintaining a robust car connection.
The broad Infineon portfolio covers most elementary functionalities of a head unit system.
- Computing: The TRAVEO™ T2G-B MCU family offers high performance (up to dual Arm® Cortex®-M7, 1500 DMIPs), wide scalability (memory density and package line-up), best-in-class energy efficiency (deep sleep mode: 35 µA, hibernate mode: 5 µA), ASIL-B functional safety and integrated hardware security module (HSM).
- Sensors: The PSoC® Automotive family offers one-stop, in-cabin touch solutions. Automotive-qualified MEMS microphone sensors provide supreme audio reception in dynamic environments.
- Connectivity & communication: Broad Wi-Fi & Bluetooth® portfolio supports various in-cabin wireless connections; CAN, LIN transceivers, and system basis chips (SBC) families connect the head unit to in-vehicle networking.
- Power supply: OPTIREG™ PMIC, linear, and switcher devices support reliable power supply; USB-C PD controllers support fast charging (up to 100 W) with best-in-class interoperability and compliance with all kinds of mobile devices.
- Storage: Broad automotive-qualified NOR flash, SRAM and F-RAM portfolio provides safe, secure, and reliable data storage.
System benefits:
- Scalability: Scalable family solutions with wide compatibilities on both hardware and software support designs from low- to high-end systems with less design effort.
- Performance: Best-in-class performance of sensing solutions (touchscreens, microphones, etc.), wireless solutions (Wi-Fi & Bluetooth®), and fast-charging solutions (USB-C PD) improves customer experience significantly.
- Security: Secured MCU, secured memory, and secured connectivity support secured firmware updates over-the-air (FOTA), and safeguard consumers from cyber-attacks.
- Total cost of ownership: Broad portfolio provides one-stop shop on both commercial and technical which significantly reduce purchase cost as well as system design effort.
ExcelonTM F-RAM™, like any other nonvolatile memory technology, is subject to physical degradation that can eventually lead to device failure if not addressed appropriately. F-RAM write/read endurance and data retention are the two end-of-life (EoL) parameters to specify its reliability and performance in a system. Learn more about the F-RAM data retention performance at various operating temperatures and find a method and guidance to accurately calculate the system’s EoL based on its operating temperature profile. Check the application note.
With the world's broadest portfolio of touchscreen solutions, our patents cover categories from panel construction and self- and mutual-capacitance sensing to scanning methods, noise immunity, and finger tracking, spanning every major area of touch sensing innovation. Our continued leadership in the touchscreen space means that we respond to new challenges and market trends with truly innovative solutions.
Learn more about automotive touchscreen solutions.
Recommended products
| PSoC® 4 |
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| PSoC™ Automotive Multitouch Touchscreens |
Infineon is leading in Real Simultaneous Dual Band (RSDB) solutions providing simultaneous operation in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, as well as Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) support. RSDB solutions provide the necessary bandwidth and the software architecture required to support complex use-case scenarios for cars, enabling combinations of AP, Station, and P2P connections simultaneously.
Learn more about automotive-qualified AIROC™ Wi-Fi & Combos devices.
Recommended WiFi and Bluetooth® products for head unit designs:
| AIROC™ Wi-Fi & Combos |
CYW89459 |
| AIROC™ Automotive Wireless |
CYW89273 |
| Bluetooth® 5.0 SoC |
CYW89820 |
EZ-PD CCGx Automotive are families of programmable, highly integrated Type-C and PD controllers targeted towards intelligent, in-vehicle charger ports (head units, rear-seat chargers, and rear-seat entertainment). Infineon‘s Automotive controllers are fully AECQ-100 qualified.
Get an overview of available design resources and features.
Recommended USB-C controller products:
| USB-C Port Controller |
CYPD7291-68LDXS (CCG7D) |
Infineon Parallel NOR Flash devices and Serial NOR Flash devices are the ideal solutions. They feature Automotive proven MirrorBit™ technology to ensure data reliability and have the high endurance required for frequent writes over the product lifespan. In addition, they provide fast system boot times and different densities to scale platforms.
Infineon’s NOR Flash solutions are AEC-Q100 Grade 1 to 3 qualified to meet automotive standards for a wide operating temperature range. Find your product via the product selector guide.
F-RAM for Automotive markets provides fast writes at full interface speed. F-RAM does not have any write delays and data is instantly non-volatile. Traditional non-volatile memories have delays of 5 or more milliseconds before data becomes non-volatile. If power is disrupted, pending data is lost unless the system has extra capacitance or batteries to keep the system on until data is stored.
F-RAM offers virtually unlimited endurance of 100 trillion read/write cycles. Traditional non-volatile memories typically have less than 1 million cycle endurance, forcing system designers to use complex wear-leveling routines and up to 4x more density to prolong the lifetime of these memories.
Infineon’s HyperRAM™ 2.0 is a high-speed, low-pin-count, self-refresh Dynamic RAM (DRAM) for high-performance embedded systems requiring expansion memory. HyperRAM 2.0 offers HyperBus™ and Octal SPI interfaces that draw upon the legacy features of both parallel and serial interface memories while enhancing system performance and ease of design, as well as reducing system cost.
Recommended memories:
XENSIV™ MEMS microphones represent a new benchmark in performance, and current audio chain limitations can be overcome. A product needs reliable sensitive microphones that suit the system. For a voice system to work well, good raw data from the microphone must be fed to the voice processing algorithms running on the main system.
Infineon helps you to integrate fast and easy into your design so that you will get your product to market quickly. Testing schemes can be fulfilled without any delays.
Learn more about our solution for Smart speakers and our partner ecosystem with ready-to-go kits. Design with us using MEMS microphone boards and find now detailed information on available MEMS microphone parts and samples.
myInfineon: Join now and enjoy the benefits
- Understand Infineon’s pioneer role driving the automotive MEMS microphone market and its needs
- Discover the main features and key benefits of Infineon’s XENSIV™ microphone and identify the target automotive applications for this product
This training is a product selection guide to help you find the most suitable MEMS microphones for your applications.
Training topics:
- Get to know why systems require frequent updates, how this is done and how automotive systems try to ensure their security when they are updated
- Learn how AURIX™ families of microcontrollers support over-the-air software updates
Description:
- Identify common security threats to modern cars
- Understand how OPTIGA™ TPM can help automotive systems achieve a high level of security and their applications in different use cases in various host environments
Description:
- Explain how the major automotive trends are shaping the evolution of electrical and electronic or E/E architectures in cars
- Identify the trending E/E architecture concepts and their impact on networking technologies and recognize the solutions that Infineon provides to support current and future E/E architectures
Description:
- Understand the evolution of the cockpit architecture
- Recognize the importance of the central modules like head unit and cockpit domain controllers and get to know Infineon solutions and their components
- Infineon has a successful history of supporting various graphics applications in cars with displays.
- Infineon's TRAVEO™ T2G microcontrollers are designed to meet size constraints, reduce costs, and improve performance and bandwidth for car displays, compared to system-on-chip solutions.
