Infineon Adds Innovative Safety Features To Its XC2300 Microcontroller Family to Fulfill Emerging Automotive Safety Standard

Neubiberg, Germany – September 30, 2008 – Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) today introduced a new series of microcontrollers for use in automotive safety applications that incorporate innovative features to comply with state-of-the-art automotive safety standards. The new XC2300A series of the XC2300 family provides 32-bit performance and a rich peripheral feature set and, with its newly added enhanced safety features, is further optimized for use in airbag systems and power-steering applications.

The members of the XC2300A series provide an application-proven and rich set of peripherals as well as specific features designed to support failure-free operation of the electronic control unit (ECU) by detecting and in some cases avoiding unplanned and undesired system behavior. These features enhance the ability of system designers to achieve compliance with the upcoming automotive industry standard ISO26262 – today’s status is Committee Draft (CD) – which defines the requirements on a system to fulfil a specific Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) The new XC2300A products are ideal for design of systems reaching the needed ASIL (up to the highest safety level ASILD) according to this ISO standard.

Specific features include an enriched Memory Protection Unit (MPU) that protects user-specified memory areas from unauthorized read, write or instruction fetch accesses. The MPU assists encapsulating safety relevant application code from “untrusted” standard software like AUTOSAR, so interferences can be avoided. To further increase system reliability, Infineon also has implemented hardware Error Correction Code (ECC) on all available memories, and a memory checker module (CRC) that provides enhanced fault detection (beyond ECC) for data and instructions in volatile and non-volatile memories. Additionally, the integrated analog-to-digital converter (ADC) now includes broken wire detection ability which can reliably detect a situation where the connection between the microcontroller and a sensor (i.e. in the airbag system) is broken or defective

XC2300A Products Launched: XC2364A, XC2365A and XC2387A

Today, Infineon is introducing three XC2300A series devices, the XC2364A, XC2365A and XC2387A, with a total of 20 software-compatible and pin-compatible products. The XC2300A series members vary according to on-chip flash memory size (448 kBytes, 576 kBytes and 832 kBytes) flash memory, number of ADC channels (16 or 24), number of Capture Compare Units (1 or 2) for powerful motor drive, and frequency (66 MHz or 80 MHz). Available package options are the green (lead-free) Low-Quad Flat Pack LQFP-100 and -144 for the temperature range -40 °C up to +125 °C.

Availability and Development Tool Support

Samples of the XC2364A, XC2365A and XC2387A are available today. Start of production is scheduled for beginning of 2009.

The XC2300A products are supported by the full suite of available development tools, including evaluation boards, debuggers, compilers and documentation.

Infineon is currently developing further derivatives to enlarge the XC2300A series of the XC2300 family to both the low- and the high-end range, including performance upgrades as well as feature enlargements. Safety application design engineers benefit from the scalability to select an MCU with the optimal combination of memory, peripheral set, frequency, temperature and packaging to match the application’s feature and performance requirements, during and after the design cycle, without any changes to the printed circuit board design.

Further information on Infineon’s automotive semiconductor portfolio and XC2300 family is available at http://www.infineon.com/automotive and http://www.infineon.com/xc2300

Original text is here