The more intricate in-car chippery gets, the happier it is
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NXP also talked about the automotive sector, which accounts for about half of its business and how digital technology was progressing in vehicles that are being designed now.
"Today in the average car, the architecture of the car is a flat point-to-point type of system. And what's happening is you're seeing more and more data come into the car, more and more data generated in the car, and it's choking that network. If you think about the lines of code for the operating system of the car, it can be up to 2 million lines of code. That's continuing to expand," said Jeff Palmer, Vice President of Investor Relations.
Palmer explained how the automotive vendors want to expand the in-car network and segment it, perhaps mirroring the way that data network architecture in the enterprise has evolved.
"They want to create some hierarchy in the car and partition the car into specific segments where you would have what we call a domain processor, and think of that as not as a microcontroller, but a multicore MPU that will control all the leaf nodes in a domain below it," Palmer said.
"That domain processor role, we've been able to identify about five of them. And they will talk again to each other against a high-speed gigabit Ethernet backbone to almost a network gateway type of a device. And so in this way, you'll be able to create some partitioning hierarchy into the car," he explained.