According to Simon Teng, Senior Director of Automotive Partnership - APAC at Arm, the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of automotive chips will reach 10% between 2020 and 2030.In addition, the auto industry will also see a transition from centralized compute towards zonal architecture.
Noting that automakers will have to change their hardware and focus on software-defined technology in the coming few years, Teng said that the traditional distributed nature of Electrical Control Units (ECUs) will no longer meet the needs for automobile data transfer and software, and that many automakers have already switched to domain architecture, reducing the number of ECUs and the wires needed. This transition will become more apparent between 2025 - 2027.
Volkswagen's all-electric ID.3 vehicles, for example, takes advantage of such domain architecture, using only 39 ECUs - 12 less compared to peers, while Tesla Model 3 further reduces ECU count to ten, simplifying the system but significantly boosts the computing power, according to Teng. However, he also pointed to the challenges of product differentiation, indicating that data, and how they are processed, will be the key factors at play.
The Arm-backed software development framework, Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE), has just seen its members quadrupled to more than 50 as it marked the anniversary of its foundation in September. The cloud-native software development platform represents a major effort by Arm to shorten the development time of software-defined vehicles (SDV),
