 Welcome and thanks again for stopping by at the exhibitors forum here in Hall 3. Our next topic is why automotive electrical systems require new microcontrollers. And our speaker today is Alessandro Mariani from ST Microelectronics. I hope, okay, I hope you had lunch. So my name is Alessandro Mariani from ST Microelectronics and I'm part of the product marketing team for automotive use, specifically for electrification microcontrollers. And today I will talk about electrifications and micros because we will see that the electrification brings new application in the market and the new application requires new technologies and the technologies new requirements for the microcontrollers. But before we get into it, I want to just start to speak a little bit about electrification. So we see that from this graph that shows the production of the light vehicles. The electrification is a real trend. You see the light blue lines show the production of internal combustion engines while the dark blue shows the electric vehicles production. And you see the growth of the electric vehicles, the production of the electric vehicles is around 13% during these years and the future years while the combustion engines are going to decrease. So the future is really electric and it starts to be a real thing very, very fast. And this is pushed mainly by the governments but we'll see that to achieve sustainability and low carbon emission it is mandatory to have these new vehicles. But new trends bring also new challenges and the first one, probably the main one is what is called range anxiety because when you use an electric vehicle, an electric car you don't have the same cruising range that you have with the standard vehicles and also the charging time if you're a user to go to have a recharge and in one minute you have a full recharge with the electric car this takes time. So improving the performances of both the batteries and the charging in something mandatory to convince people to switch to an electric vehicle. But there is not only the range anxiety but also performance and safety are taking an important role for the electrification because especially in the past there was this idea that electric cars were boring to drive. So this is a challenge from one side and an opportunity to the other because the dynamics of an electric car is different and we can use this to give new feelings to the users. Also the improvement over time because if you think about a famous American car brand that have electric cars, they update their cars when it's in the field. So when it's on the road you have updates that improve the vehicles during its lifetime. And for electrification is important as well because you can monitor and gather data and improve the algorithm over time. So when we speak about electric applications we speak about this kind of stuff. So starting from your left we see the grid where the electricity is taken then the grid flows through the electric vehicle supply equipment and arrives into the electric vehicle through the plug. The first application we find in the car is the on-board charger. This is the box that converts the electricity from the grid to the DC current for the batteries. After that we have directly connected to the OBC, the battery management system and the power distribution unit that of course distributes all the electric power to all the system in the car, to the battery pack and to the traction inverter. The traction inverter that is controlled by the vehicle control unit. On the bottom right you see the traction motor that is the real heart of an electric car, the one that moves the car and also the performance for the traction inverter are really, really important both for the dynamics. So we spoke about fun to drive but also for the efficiency because the more efficient and the more driving range, cruising range you have. So today I want to focus on one specific application that is the on-board charger. You see on the left this board that is a reference design made by ST. We are talking about high voltage so you see many big components that are mainly inductors and capacitors. And on the right instead we have a simplified scheme on what on-board charger is. It's mainly divided into two different components. The first one is the power factor converter that takes the electricity from the grid that is in alternate current and can be a single phase or three phase and convert in DC. And then we have the DC-DC converter that takes the output of the PFC and convert in high voltage to 400 voltage that is the usual battery voltage even to 800 voltage that is a new trend that we are starting to see for debaters. And the type of on-board charger can be several. It can support, as I said before, single phase or three phase. It can support different powers from 3 kW to 7, 11 up to 22 kW that impact on all the electronics but also on the charging time. It can be mono-directional so taking the electricity from the grid to the vehicles but we are starting to see also bidirectional on-board charger. So taking the electricity from the vehicle and giving back to the grid. This is what is called vehicle to grid. So using your car that is most of the time parked in your box as a battery for your house or to sell the electricity to the grid. So there are several KPIs. I listed here the main ones but there are also others. There are the efficiency of course. Efficiency for on-board charger means that you're improving the charging time. If you want a bigger range for your car, you need bigger batteries but bigger batteries means also bigger charging times. So efficiency here tends to be as close as possible as 100% that is really a tremendous goal. Then we have power density and specific powers. You saw in the image before that the biggest component on the OBC are inductors and capacitor and try to optimize means reducing the sites, the weight and eventually the cost. But this is not just an electric device but it's a smart device. It has a micro. It is connected to the grid on one side to all the rest of the vehicle on the other side. So we need to think about the system also as a smart system that communicates, that is a supervisor. So we have to take into account also other KPIs such as security and safety that is very, very important in automotive. So for the first three KPIs we see that we are switching from traditional transistor technologies. Here we are talking about power electronics where we use in the past IGBT transistor and silicon MOSFET for the actuation of the OBC of the traction inverter. But today there is a strong switch to other technologies called wind band gap technologies that are the silicon carbide and the gallium nitride. On this graph you can see on the X axis the switching frequency these technologies can operate, these type of transistors can operate and on the Y axis the power they can support. So the silicon carbide for OBC are the best choice for the moment because it can support high power that the gallium nitride today is not able to reach. And increasing the switching frequency together with fast control loop from the micro can really improve the efficiency because you have a really more precise control signal. But also you can with this kind of frequency that we are talking about is more than 150 kHz you can really shrink down capacitance and inductance so capacitor inductors improving all the rest of KPIs. The problem we have is that there is a gap, an existing gap that is why I'm here today talking about this presentation. So today's microcontrollers are not able to leverage the power of silicon carbide and gallium nitride because they are not designed, as these are new technologies, they are not designed to go to this high frequency together with all the system KPIs with I talked about before. So what is the today's approach? Today's approach is to use external micros. So you see here the same onboard charger scheme I put before with its proper isolation and then we use a general purpose MCUs as always that communicate with the vehicles implement all the supervising of the system and connected to it we use external DSP that are the real controller of the PSC. And this is a good solution because you can really go up to very high frequency to 100 kHz, 300 kHz and even more. And so you can meet the electric APIs we talked before. However there are some drawbacks that the DSP are not meant to be used as an MCU. So the safety goes maybe is difficult to be reached with the DSP. If we talk about bidirectional onboard charger we may think we may need to reach as LD, as delta requirement for safety and DSP maybe has some implementation safety mechanism but often does not reach this level of safety. Even worse for security where are not even meant for security. So in the future car where the electronic part are more and more complex you have tens of micros on an electric car up to 100. Every single device can be a security threat. So we have the industry mandate that every single device must be secure and DSP usually does not implement any security features. The other point is the AutoSAR. Normally DSP has its own tool chain. So AutoSAR maybe is not required from an OEM or tele-wide but often it is. So AutoSAR is not something that DSP can support. At last point is the firmware over the air so we are talking about updates. Again we want something that can improve over time. The idea of the vehicle is changing. The vehicle is not defined when installed but can evolve during the lifetime. And implementing an update with DSP is not always easier. Maybe it can be done but it's very complicated. So what can be a solution? A solution is to remove the general purpose MCU remove DSP and use a dedicated microcontroller that is specifically designed for this application. So a microcontroller that can both communicate so with automotive interface that can implement security that can implement safety up to SLD but can also be able to leverage the silicon carbide feature so going up with higher solution timers with fast analog to digital converter and all the IPs that are needed to use in this kind of application the onboard charger, the DC-DC converter, the traction inverters. So this is something that is new to them in the market. This is something not easy to find. And in ST we are developing a family called Stellaree. Stellaree is a ST brand for our automotive microcontroller based on ARM technology that are specifically meant for electrification. A microcontroller that as you can see has a fast sensing actuation to have mass acceleration to perform the control loop in a very optimized way that is an enabler for SICK and GAN but on the other side it has all the features that are required in an automotive microcontroller. So safety as we said before, it has hardware security module we have hardware support for the OVRDA updates and of course we have the automotive interface we have embedded MVMs we have a scalable real-time performance based on ARM as I said before so we have full microcontrollers that can allow us to simplify the design because we have a single device instead of a micro plus one, two, three DSPs so the design is simpler. Development is simpler because we have just one micro to develop so one software to change less licenses so everything is streamlined to have a faster attempt to market to have a simplified design of the application and reach all the standards that are required for the automotive industry. I don't want to go into the details but if you are really interested we have a couple of these devices in our booth in ST so I invite you all at all for a stand 148 when we can present more in detail the Stella A if you want or I'm open to accept your question, there is a microphone here so you can use it to ask me questions about the presentation and our products Thank you very much No questions? It's called Stella E Thank you very much for your time I hope you enjoyed the presentation and I hope to see you at ST booth Thank you Thank you Alessandro The speaker at 3.30pm is Bernhard Rill so just a few moments, the next presentation is going to start