SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP275: How NXP Semiconductors is Helping the Automotive Ecosystem to Move Forward with Sebastien Clamagirand

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Dan is joined by Sebastien Clamagirand, Global Senior Vice President of Automotive System Engineering and Marketing at NXP Semiconductors. Sebastien focuses on system solutions for vehicle architectures that support the shift to software-defined vehicles. Under his leadership, NXP delivers pre-integrated, scalable … Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nennie, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Sebastian Colomar-Journ, Global Senior Vice President of Automotive Systems Engineering and Marketing at NXP Semiconductors. Sebastian leads Automotive Systems Engineering and Marketing at NXP Semiconductors. Sebastian leads Automotive Systems Engineering and Marketing at NXP, focusing on system solutions for vehicle architectures that support the shift to software-defined vehicles. Under his leadership, NXP delivers pre-integrated scalable solutions that accelerate time-to-market

with ecosystem collaboration as a key enabler. With over 25 years in semiconductors, Sebastian has previously been general manager of Secure Payment and Identity Solutions at NXP and has had leadership roles in marketing, product management and strategy. Welcome to the podcast Seb. Thank you Daniel, good morning.

So can you tell me more about your role at NXP? Sure, so as you just said, my title is Senior Vice President of Automotive System Engineering and Marketing. So what does that mean? Actually my role is within our automotive business line to make sure that we are understanding the system of our customers, the automotive system at vehicle level, and that we are understanding the system of our customers, the automotive system at vehicle level, and that we are offering a platform based on the components that my peers are developing.

So we'd be on the processing side, on the networking side, on the power management. We want to make sure that we are putting those components together and making a platform out of it in order to answer the OEM and tier one needs. We are having different dimensions in terms of platform. The first focus we are having is in supporting the OEM on their EE architecture, so electrification and engineering of the vehicle. And the second one is regarding everything

linked to ADAS solutions and the third one is everything related to electrification of the vehicle. So that's the three systems we are looking at, the EE, the ADAS, safety and electrification. Interesting. So what first attracted you to the semiconductor industry and in particular the automotive side of it? So semiconductor for me has always been something attractive and interesting. I always wanted to understand how things are working and at that time when I was doing my study the informatics or software and semiconductors were I I would say, the key technical topics which were answering most of the challenges. Now I started my engineering into the area of mobile and then security. And when I look at the evolution of semiconductors, there was one domain where the content

was growing significantly, and that was automotive. So I decided four years ago, actually, to move from the security smart card business to the automotive in order to be part of the next story of automotive, to be part of this revolution, where you get more and more complex semiconductor into it, and where you get more and more complex software-defined vehicles? Yeah, good question. I think there will be several changes into the

automotive ecosystem in the coming years, first driven by the megatrends we are seeing there, so autonomous driving, electrification, and software-defined vehicles. So those megatrends are going to impact significantly the technology required into the car and as a consequence are going to as well significantly impact how the ecosystem is interfacing together, what does the role of the different player into the ecosystem, but as well how the different players organize into their own company. You see actually the technical expertise evolving from mechanical to semiconductors to software. And for that we see actually many of the OEM and of the tier one getting new leaders coming

from the tech company in order to help them going through this transformation. So I'm really foreseeing an evolution of the ecosystem as well as an evolution of the technologies going into the car. Being more specific, if we look at two of those three mega trends, electrification and SDV, we see that in electrification, the market has been accelerating significantly in the past years. Then the growth continues steadily, maybe at a lower pace than expected a couple of years ago, but still at a significant pace, because we expect from 2024 to 2027, a giga of about 20%, which is a significant growth.

And if you look at the regional perspective, you will see different dynamics. So China is definitely leading the electrification. And you will continue to see a steady growth of pure EV into the country. When you look at Europe and America, actually there have been a change in the direction where it's not only fully V but it's hybrid which are going to have a bigger weight going forward because we have seen most of the OEM looking at the architecture and changing the architecture which was initially targeting pure EV to be able to serve EV and ice car or hybrid car in the future.

So the trends are different, which means as well that the architecture that the different OEM will have to develop in order to enable electrification of the vehicle will be different per agents. In electrification, another trend we see is the change from a 12 volt to a 48 volt architecture into the car. It has been initiated in the US and now we see a strong acceleration at all the OEM looking at these 48 volt trends. And the reason for that is that moving from 12 volt to 48 volt has a strong benefit in terms of cost and in terms of energy management. The benefit in terms of cost is that when you go to 48 volt, so four times higher voltage

into the car, actually you have a direct impact on the wiring of your car. You can go with wire sections which are as reduced as the voltage is increased. So that's definitely going to remove some weight and so remove some material out of the wiring harness. So definitely a significant cost reduction for the OEMs. And the other reason is a power reduction, which is essential if you want to improve the range that your XEV can drive with. So, definitely, this electrification trend is going to continue to impact the OEM architecture.

The third mega trend is on the SDV side, and this one is even having a bigger impact because it's impacting the complete architecture of the vehicle, not only the electrification area as we are discussing before. And the Kegar, the impact of SDV evolution in the coming three years is even bigger. By 2027, we expect 48% kegars. So, growing from 13 million vehicles considered as SDV in 2024 to up to 42 million units by 2027. So, a significant growth of software-defined vehicles. And in order to of software defined vehicle. And in order to execute on this gross forecast, actually the OEM needs to make significant evolution

of the architecture. The reason for this architecture evolution is that the drive of the SDV is basically to provide a car to the consumer that you want to be updatable and upgradable. And so that's basically the promise that the OEM are having towards the consumer like you and me. They promise that in the future you'll be able to update some of the features of your car to get better performances or even to upgrade and get new features that we are not having before.

And in order to do that, it's requiring a different thinking about the architecture, but as well it's requiring much more complexity in terms of the software embedded into the car. And so the complexity, the management of this software complexity is something which is at the core of the architecture evolution. At the same time, many of the OEMs are having to apply those changes on many different cars into their portfolio. So they have to be able to scale from a segment A to a segment E, so from a low end car to a high end car. And so this scalability is the second biggest challenges that the OEM has to face. So those two together, the software complexity and the scalability challenges are bringing some strong hardware architecture change to the OEM.

And that's probably the biggest challenges that the OEMs have to solve in the coming years in order to be able to answer to those promises they made to the consumer regarding the SDV, updatability and updatability. Maybe one other topic which is becoming more and more in the news is and where the OEM will have to learn together with with the rest of the ecosystems with the software partners with the tier one with the semi vendors is how is AI going to impact the vehicle. AI in the sense of autonomous driving where that's where you have most of the intelligence today in the car but AI in the edge. So all those issues where you have today

some algorithm running in the future you can expect that they will become more and more intelligent and that you will require to have some AI into the edge. For example when you are driving and the vehicle and the dynamic of your vehicle, you want to be able to have some top prediction to have a better dynamic of your car. Or if you think about your electrification system, about your BMS, you want to be able to do fault detection and to do predictive maintenance about it,

so that you can, ahead of failure, predict it and act. And for that we require a summation of AI capability into the edge. So all those technical trends are visible in the market, are requiring some evolution into the semiconductor portfolio and as well into the software portfolio and all of that are going to drive the success or not of the OEMs. Interesting. So what will these changes mean for OEMs and customers? Can you give us a little more detail? Yeah, I think the change implied for the OEM is that they need to be able to provide a scalable solution in a smaller timeframe. Today, it's about five years architecture development

for an architecture which is not so scalable. They need to learn how to make scalable architecture at an efficient cost in a reduced time to market. And the benchmark here today is China, where they announced to be able to do a new architecture every 12 and 18 months, which is reality, right? The fact is that in China, they don't have yet the scalability challenges.

So they are able to evolve the architecture and move to the next one within a short timeframe, but it's not yet scalable. So the challenges for most of the OEM will be to combine the scalability with a time to market and come with something which is at the end cost efficient for the consumer. In order to do that, they need to evolve their organization to embed new competencies in their leadership. to do that, they need to evolve their organization

to embed new competencies in their leadership. They need to change their architecture and they need to make sure that their vehicle maintenance is managed in a different way going forward. So what are NXPs main USPs, and how is it helping the industry navigate such change? You know, I see a recently acquired TT Tech Auto. What benefits will that have? Yeah, so I would say the biggest strength of NXP in this part of the automotive is, so meaning the core of the vehicle, what is making a car

a car, is to start with the breadth of its portfolio. So we are the only semi-vendor having such breadth and depth of component to go into the core of the vehicle. By breadth, I mean that we are having a portfolio which is going from processing to networking to power management. And from the depth, I mean that for each of the three dimensions, we have a broad portfolio which can scale from low end up to the high end. So with that, we can really answer with one of the challenges, which is the hardware scalability. On top of that, what NXP is doing is, and that's what my organization is doing, is making sure that we are building,

based on those components, based on those bricks, that we are providing solution and system, which are pre-validated in order to accelerate the time to market for the tier one and for the OEMs. And that's exactly what we have been positioning almost a year ago with our system platform called NXP Car Ride where NXP is going to provide not only components but it's going to provide a platform, a system platform to the ecosystem. And this platform is basically composed of our different components,

glued together with a software. So we are going to integrate the software on our processors, so the software of our partners. We are going to do this pre-integration to make sure that when the customers want to start this development, it's not started at enablement software on top of the MCU, but it's starting at a pre-integrated software stack where you can start developing directly its application.

With that, we expect that we can save nine to 12 months in terms of development process for our customers. And that's where the announced acquisition agreement of Titec Auto is having a full sense because Titec Auto is a software company well known into the ecosystem in terms of safety software, in terms of safety middleware. And what they are going to provide to NXP is the software integration capability. This software integration capability of TT Tech Auto will be used in order to make sure we can execute on our core ride roadmap, ensuring that we can integrate our software partner operating system into our portfolio, S32 portfolio. And on top of that, we are going to leverage their development environment, what we call

the CI-CD environment, in order to have a direct connection to our partner development environment and to our customer development environment. So joining their software safety expertise to hardware safety and secure expertise of NXP is going to definitely accelerate the development of a platform to solve the SDB challenges of the OEM, meaning the complexity reduction and meaning coming with a platform allowing scalability. Great and final question, Sebastian, what is next for NXP? Yeah, so next for us is definitively, so coming day one with T-Tech Auto, getting their software expertise integrated within NXP.

For us, we'll have to learn from them on how software business is in automotive. That's a key element. And based on that, NXP is as well going to continue to investigate the new mega trends into the market. So the 48 volt I mentioned before, the AI at the edge is as well a key topic. So being leader in the automotive system in the edge, we want to make sure that we are providing the component, the solution, the system enabling those new mega trends toward our customers. Thank you for your time, Sebastian.

Hopefully, we can get an update later in the year. More than welcome. Very happy to be here with you today. Thank you. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.