Arm Ups Automotive Ante, from CPU Cores to Compute Subsystem
Arm's Zena CSS will likely have existing automotive SoC suppliers wondering what follows Arm’s move to a subsystem. Is this an opening for the IP vendor to go upstream and ultimate its own SoC?
Arm Zena CSS (Image: Arm)
Arm, the world’s largest provider of semiconductor intellectual property (IP) cores, this week unveiled Zena, a compute subsystem (CSS) designed for automakers seeking to scale semiconductor solutions across vehicle functions and models.
Built on a bank of 16 Arm CPUs, Zena CSS is intended to shorten time-to-market for carmakers, tier ones, and silicon designers developing vehicles. The company’s subsystems will consist of pre-validated, pre-verified blocks and virtual prototypes, enabling customers to develop software as they design hardware. By making compute blocks scalable, Arm is also promising automakers “flexibility to innovate” by allowing semiconductor companies to add their own NPU, GPU and ISP as they differentiate their products.
Arm will offer Zena CSS, designed to scale across ADAS, central compute, and IVI use cases.
The Zena CSS introduction will likely have existing automotive SoC suppliers wondering what follows Arm’s move to a subsystem. Is this an opening for the IP vendor to go upstream and ultimately launch its own chips?
During a press briefing, Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s automotive division, said, “No intentions to do that here.”
She explained, “Arm CSS is an RTL, and it allows maximum flexibility on process nodes, so you can synthesize it in any process node you deem fit, as well as it allows for either to be integrated into monolithic silicon or chiplet based silicon.”
The impact on the electronics industry of Arm’s moving up its IP business from cores to subsystems remains to be seen.
On one hand, Arm’s Zena CSS could provide old-line carmakers to catch up to “China speed.” But this upshift could “come with a sting-in-the-tail,” cautioned Ian Riches, vice president of Global Automotive Practice at TechInsights, affecting customers who design automotive SoCs based on Arm’s IP cores. These chip suppliers, many of whom are already Arm customers, could see their design parts being commoditized or usurped by Arm’s Zena CSS solutions.
If Arm’s current customers see Arm’s expanded role more as competition than as cooperative acceleration, the shooting match could backfire, Riches cautioned. It could hurry Arm’s current customers toward RISC-V adoption.
RISC-V and China
At stake isn’t just Arm’s optics. Zena CSS is a key to its future business growth.
Right now, Arm is already fighting on multiple fronts, with RISC-V and China as two of the battlegrounds.
Riches calls these factors “two sides of the same coin,” each picking up its own momentum.
Although the RISC-V market remains fragmented, investors in Quintauris, a RISC-V joint venture, are moving rapidly and together. Big guns in the MCU/MPU space who are part of the Quintauris include NXP, STMicroelectronics, Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, and Qualcomm. The group has specified “real time” in the “automotive” segment to go first with its RISC-V profile. This is because the auto segment “has already shown interest in transitioning into RISC-V,” explained Pedro Lopez, business development head at Quintauris.
Meanwhile, many Chinese automakers are eager to develop SoCs. They are determined to increase Chinese content in their vehicles — a mandate monitored by local and central governments.
Yu Yang, principal analyst for automotive semiconductors at Yole Group, pointed out that several large Chinese OEMs such as Leapmotor, Great Wall Motors, Dongfeng Motors, have RISC-V-based CPU cores designed locally.
Arm’s automotive ecosystem
Arm’s strength is a huge ecosystem already established in the automotive industry. Arm boasts that “nearly every global OEM today, including Tesla, Rivian, NIO, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Geely, relies on Arm technology as the foundational compute platform powering everything from safety-critical ADAS to immersive in-cabin experiences.”
This also means that Arm will have a lot to lose if they can’t keep customers interested in Arm.
Cultivating new customers is another challenge. Potential clients not already affiliated with Arm are few and far between — unless Arm is counting on Chinese car OEMs to embrace the Zena CSS.
Arm is committed to making development of AI-driven software-defined vehicles simpler, faster and more scalable. Zena CSS will also “play well” in the emerging automotive chiplet market, noted Riches.
Above all, Zena CSS’s biggest appeal to existing customers is “the prospect of time savings,” he noted.
With a product design cycle substantially shrunken by Chinese OEMs, Arm’s new compute subsystem could, in theory, enable automakers in the west to match China’s pace.
Suraj Gajendra, vice president for products and solutions in Arm’s automotive business, claimed that by reducing costs and complexity during development, Zena CSS requires “up to 20% fewer silicon engineering resources when compared with traditional IP based designs.” Zena CSS also reduces “up to 30% in porting effort from platform to platform through software standardization, saving software development time and costs.”
A sting-in-the-tail potential
Still unknown is whether existing Arm customers find genuine value in embracing Zena CSS, especially among those aware that the subsystem could see parts of their automotive SoC designs commoditized by Arm.
“What Arm is providing does have some echoes with existing efforts of automotive semiconductor suppliers such as NXP (CoreRide), Renesas (R-Car/RoX), STMicroelectronics (Stellar),” explained Riches.
The First-Generation Arm Zena CSS. Arm will offer the consistent Arm architecture providing the ability to scale across ADAS, central compute, and IVI use cases for both monolithic and chiplet-based silicon designs. (Source: Arm)
One point is clear. Although companies such as NXP and Infineon have taken pride in designing and packaging Arm CPU cores with the necessary safety/security functions, with Zena CSS, that “could soon have almost zero value – depending on the cost that Arm puts on its own work here,” noted Riches.
Asked about the cost of Zena CSS, Arm declined to provide commercial details. Arm’s Vachani acknowledged that there will be a standard licensing agreement with royalties, as Arm offers with all its IP. But she emphatically noted, “Remember. This isn't really about licensing or royalties. You're improving your time to market by a year. You're reducing your engineering cost by 20% and that's really what we're focused on.”
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