NXP Partners With Macronix For Automotive Memory And Biwin Acer/HP Memory/Storage Products
Las Vegas Convention Center, Home of the CES
getty
While at the 2023 CES I visited Taiwanese memory maker, Macronix on their product line up and had some meetings after the event with NXP Semiconductor (NXP). Biwin, fresh from their Shanghai public offering, was also showing Acer and HP licensed DRAM and NAND flash products. Let’s look at what I saw.
Macronix offers memory products to support some of NXP’s automotive package lineup. NXP is offering electronic packages for automotive environments that can enable software-defined vehicles (SDV) that can manage local hardware as well as interactions with cloud-based services. Zonal architectures simplify hardware and reduces wiring and SDV enables continuous software integration and deployment. These concepts are represented in the image below. According to Strategy Analytics (March 2022), NXP is the automotive processor market leader with 26% market share in 2021.
NXP Semiconductor Plans for Vehicles of the Future
NXP Semiconductor Briefing
NXP is creating high performance automotive processor (systems on chip, SoCs) as well as multi-chip packages. These would use high speed wireless connectivity, cloud infrastructure and cloud-native software and tools, advances in automotive Ethernet technology and AI/ML tools to enable next generation ADAS, autonomous and electric vehicles.
According to the company, NXP automotive processing capabilities include deep application understanding, world-class automotive safety and automotive networking, security, software reuse across domains, zonal and end node and a broad partner network. The company makes vehicle network processors (S32G family) and automotive real-time processors (S32Z and S32E), the S32K3 automotive MCUs for zonal control and edge nodes and the S32K39/S32K37 microcontrollers for electric vehicle applications. NXP’s is implementing these designs into automobiles with their System in Packaging (SiP) options for combining S32 chiplet products (5nm to 40nm), as well as other chiplets from various partners, into an automotive grade package.
Brian Carlson, Global Marketing Director for Vehicle Control and Networking at NXP Semiconductor told me, “We use a SiP approach to support a wide range of customer needs such as analog and 5V I/O support and application-specific peripherals well as for flash memory (NVM). It allows us to leverage the best technology for each feature and scale memory as needed for applications. This enables feature set flexibility, faster time-to-market for variants, customization to meet customer needs in the future, and the ability to support the industry’s largest integrated NVM (up to 64 MB of NOR flash). We can offer the right solutions to a wide range of global customers’ applications faster.”
Macronix (maker of NOR and NAND flash for many embedded and industrial applications) is providing NOR flash for NXP SiP products enabling computing and sensor applications. Macronix NOR flash enables reliable boots and field updates. NXP says that all data is encrypted moving between the parts of the SiP (enabling data protection and privacy). In addition, any external memory is also encrypted.
Macronix was showing its various serial and parallel NOR flash products as well as various NAND and 3D NAND (64 and 96-layer now and going to 128-layer) products for embedded applications. These also include the company’s recently announced FortiX memory-centric flash memory for use in fingerprint identification, pattern and voice recognition. The company said it had joined the UCIe consortium to participate in data center and enterprise chiplet package applications and plans to have UCIe products available by the end of 2023. The company said that it is also working on 3D NOR products, has a partnership on phase change memory and has a resistive memory technology in development.
Biwin went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on December 30, 2022. The company was founded in 2010 and focuses on sales of flash memory and DRAM products. Its main markets are embedded memory, consumer-grade storage products and storage products for industrial use. The company was exhibiting at the 2023 CES with products licensed with Acer and HP.
The Acer products included SO-DIMMS, U-DIMMS and DDR4 DRAM, some CFast and CFExpress memory cards, UF300 USB drives as well as several varieties of SSDs including SATA and NVMe SSDs in various form factors. HP licensed products included internal and external SSDs and DRAM memory.
Among the products Acer was showing at the CES was a single-sided M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x 4 NVMe 1.4 SSD for Acer using YMTC Xstacking 3.0 3D NAND flash chips (the company’s Predator GM7 SSD). The GM7 SSD is shown below.
Biwin GM7 Preditor NVMe SSD
Biwin Product Image
YMTC is now on the US Entity List, meaning that imports and exports with the company have to be approved by the US Commerce Department. The drive has a Maxiotek MP2603 DRAM-less SSD controller, also from China. It is rated at up to 7.3 GB/s sequential read/write performance and 1M IOPS. Endurance is 1,300 TB written and the drives have a 5-year limited warranty. The 2TB drive sells for $160. Biwin will be offering this SSD in Asia but also hopes it will be able sell it in the US market.
At the 2023 CES NXP Semiconductor was talking about their S32 automotive electronic packages that enable smart connected and electric vehicles. Partner Macronix provides NOR and flash memory for NXP products and other embedded applications. Biwin introduces a number of DRAM and NAND flash products sold under Acer and HP licenses.
