Freescale Offers Cortex-based Automotive Microcontroller Product to Streamline Software Development

By CIOReview | Thursday, July 2, 2015

AUSTIN,TX: Freescale announces automotive microcontroller (MCU) product line designed for an improved software development and optimal software reuse.

Automotive advancement is increasingly depending on software, creating more room for innovation and development. Software increases complexity and creates significant code maintain and time-to-market challenges resulting automotive electronic suppliers to assign more of their development resources to software than hardware.

Freescale addresses the challenges by introducing the S32K –an automotive micro controller (MCU) crafted to simplify software development. Built on ARM Cortex architecture, the S32K delivers scalability and compatibility for a range of automotive electronics applications traditionally served by a heterogeneous and incongruous mix of 8-, 16- and 32-bit MCUs.

Freescale is introducing an automotive-grade software development kit (SDK) providing critical middleware for a set of drivers necessary to operate S32K MCUs. S32 Design Studio (DS) is an integrated development environment for automotive and reliable MCUs that enable editing, compiling and debugging designs. DS is engineered to eliminate months of R&D time across all phases of development, from rapid prototyping to production readiness and re-use on the next project.

Freescale offers scalable ARM Cortex-based portfolio for automotive applications, sharing the same ARM Cortex architecture customer software written for the S32K product lines will be compatible across numerous MCUs and automotive applications, allowing customers to dramatically extend the value of automotive software investments via code reuse.

Future-proofing through hardware

Apart from software hurdles, automotive engineers could also face challenges with respect to compliance of design systems with current and future standards. Freescale SafeAssure functional safety program simplifies the process of system compliance with the solutions designed to address the requirements of automotive and industrial functional safety standards. S32K MCUs incorporate a Secure Hardware Extension (SHE) compliant module to help secure communications and protect the integrity of subsystems.

"Freescale ships more than one million units per day into the general purpose automotive microcontroller market," said Manuel Alves, Global Product Line Manager, Automotive MCU Group, Freescale. "The volume and diversity of software running in automobiles around the world continues to grow. There's a tremendous opportunity for building more reusable software platforms, and S32K provides a very compelling hardware basis for it. The new S32K MCUs are Freescale’s response to the market shifting from optimizing bits and bytes to optimizing software investments for the long term.”