Simona Almajan, NXP Semiconductors: “We are very optimistic, we have many ongoing projects, and we plan to go beyond software development”

“The IPCEI project has just been approved, it really took quite a long time to prepare the documents and sign them, but it is an extraordinary achievement. It is an extraordinary partnership. Through this project we will provide more jobs and support the development of microelectronics.

Projects like IPCEI (Important Projects of Common European Interest), of this magnitude, do not appear every year. These are opportunities that appear once every 5-10 years. So, we want there to be more projects like this.

There is a lot of talk about software defined vehicles. And there is still talk about the need for a major change in the architecture of the car, which is simply no longer sustainable. Today’s architecture will not cope with the transition to autonomous cars. And then architecture was redefined.

There are two major changes: a very big change from the user’s perspective and a very big change from the architectural perspective,” Simona Almajan, Country Manager, NXP Semiconductors said at Automotive R&D Power Breakfast organized by Automotive Today.

“We are talking about the transition towards a physical simplification of the machine in which we have that high-performance computer in the middle and zonal gateways on the outside.

That HPC orchestrates everything, and autonomous machines need abstraction, virtualization, simplification. Since everything is so complex, isolation is needed. Machine architectures and software are designed to simplify accessing interfaces.

A radar application developer, for example, doesn’t need to know the details of the microcontroller, doesn’t need to know what the security firmware is in the microcontroller, everything needs to be abstracted so that everyone works on their own piece.

Another very important aspect of these SDVs – cars of the future – is that they will retain their value over time. What does this mean? A car that we have today and that does not have over-the-air updates loses its value in a few months, a year. These SDVs are and will be updated through over-the-air updates. These cars will be updated like mobile phones.

Enormous investments are being made in software, cyber security and of course in AI.

We are very optimistic, we have many ongoing projects, we are growing every year the number of microcontrollers and microprocessors, so we need to prepare the software for them.

We are officially inaugurating our Sibiu site, we are expanding our portfolio, we have plans to go beyond software development, we will open the hardware design very soon.”