Micron’s 4150AT SSD to meet next-gen automotive storage needs

An article written by Anton Shilov from EE TIMES, in collaboration with Adrien Sanchez and Thibault Grossi from Yole Group.

Modern cars are transforming rapidly from vehicles that bring a person from point A to point B with decent comfort, to computers on wheels. As a result, modern and next-generation vehicles—battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hybrid/plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV/PHEV), software defined vehicles (SDVs), or vehicles with full self-drive (FSD)—require components that are akin to those used in computers. This not only includes high-performance application processors, but also enough memory, high-capacity storage and sophisticated I/O. (…)

In fact, many subsystems within a car tend to use the same data (e.g., maps). Today, that data must be recorded on different drives (with unnecessary redundance), which increases storage requirements for cars. But with four PCIe x1 ports, SR-IOV, and with private and shared namespace capabilities, it is possible to share data between different functions of a car, which simplifies vehicles both on the hardware and software side of things. Meanwhile, since some namespaces can be set to private and therefore accessible for only one or two VMs—whereas others can be shared between multiple VMs—there is no compromise in terms of security. Furthermore, this also helps lower power consumption and TCO.

“The main advantages we see are the reduction of storage footprint and power consumption, lowering the average cost/GB in auto and TCO,” said Thibault Grossi, a senior technology and market analyst in the memory division at Yole Group. “It also enables the possibility of sharing data across different controllers/SoCs, avoiding unwanted data redundancy near different controllers.”

“Having a shared storage resource also brings flexibility in the way the storage resources are allocated to the different SoCs and VMs. For example, this could ease OTA upgrade management,” said Adrien Sanchez, a senior technology and market analyst in the computing and software division at Yole Group.

… Read the full article HERE.

Source: https://www.eetimes.com/