Automotive Ethernet and the Software Defined Vehicle | The Six Five Summit

Hello, and welcome to the six five Summit Automotive track session, automotive, ethernet, and the software defined vehicle. I'm Olivia Blanchard, research director at the RUM Group, and I am thrilled to introduce Amir Barv, vice President Marketing and Automotive at Marvell Technology. And together we're gonna talk about what the automotive ethernet is and how it is transforming the automotive sector.

Thanks for being here, Amir. And let's jump right in. So my first question to you is, give us some quick background on Marvell and tell us a little bit also about what Marvell has been doing in the automotive space.

Okay, great. So Marvell is a 29 years old fabulous semiconductor company. Okay.

That is, uh, delivering, uh, products for four main sectors of the market. It's data center, which right now is our biggest, uh, uh, market sector. It's enterprise, it's carrier, and it's automotive.

And the company, uh, revenue is growing very nicely since 2016 when our new CEO Matt Murphy joined the company, uh, Matt, he, he's coming from the automotive world, you know, in Maxim. Uh, he, uh, managed many, uh, automotive products and he understood the potential of this market and, uh, uh, when he joined the company. Okay.

The first thing he did, one of the first thing was to hire a very experienced, uh, general manager with two, and, uh, started a new business unit that is specifically targeting the automotive markets. Um, over time, uh, Mike Yerger, the new gm, uh, replaced the wheel. Uh, and today, uh, we are one of the fastest growing business unit in the company.

Um, we have, uh, by now, uh, design wins with more than 45 OEMs, and this is including 13 out of the, uh, biggest 15, uh, OEMs. Uh, we are, we get a very high, uh, credibility in the market. Okay.

And, uh, you probably heard about the latest award that we receive from General Motor, uh, for the supplier of the year. And, uh, they chose us, you know, I think they have something like 20,000 suppliers, and this is for innovation quality and the support that we are providing them. So we have very successful business unit in a very successful and nicely bright company.

Excellent. Yes. And, and congratulations by the way.

Uh, so we're seeing how auto manufacturers are adding a lot of digital features and services to their cars, um, ranging from, you know, seat warmers on demand to autonomous driving and cockpit telemetry, uh, conductivity, uh, all these systems live on the car now. And, and my question to you is, what is the automotive Ethernet's role in all of this? How does it all fit?

So, great question. So metaphorically, uh, you can think on the ethernet in the car as the nervous system. Okay.

So there is the processors, you know, there is the sensors like camera and, you know, other sensors in the car. And ethernet is really, uh, the network that connect all of them and need to serve, uh, you know, the different applications, uh, you know, in the pathway possible based on the needs, based on the needs of this application. What ethernet brings to the car is probably more than 50 years of development, okay.

Of this standard that started with other markets like, uh, data center and enterprise. Um, it's bringing new features like, uh, switching virtualization, security, uh, quality of service that is required in the automotive. Um, I would say that, uh, one of the biggest advantage of ethernet in the car is really related to the, uh, uh, vision of ethernet end to end.

Okay. That can help to leverage software development, uh, that, uh, the OEM are doing for the, uh, for those vehicles. Okay.

I dunno if you know, but in a, uh, high-end car today, they have more than 300 million lights of co Okay. And whenever they need to change the software to move with between different trim or the new models, okay? There is a lot of effort in order to change and test this software.

So when everything is based on ethernet in the car end-to-end, that makes the life of the software developer much easier. And, and that's the reason, you know, that they really like the, the solution of ethernet, uh, to be re to replace any other protocols that exist in the cars today. Right.

No, that makes sense. So speaking of, of the, the, the network inside the car, how, how did the car network evolve and, uh, I guess what are the different stages it will still go through and, and where are we, uh, along that, that journey of development? Okay, so if you look on the car, the, this, the electronics in the car, the system in the car, I would say until 2015, this is what we used to call device centric.

Okay. In these cars you had systems like GPS, like the radio, the city, but each of those systems was an individual system with its own processor or controller with very small interaction between those systems. So really there was no network, real network in the car moving forward anywhere from 2015.

Okay. And I, I still, until today, probably until 2025, uh, we see the, the, uh, transition into what we call application centric. Okay.

Where we have in the card domains, each domain encapsulate many different application under it. So for example, we have infotainment, so infotainment including the, the GPS, you know, the radio, the operating system that is being used in the car, the connection to the phones. And, uh, in order to support the, uh, application centric, uh, we developed the, uh, a, the system architecture, the network architecture that called domain architecture.

In the domain architecture for each system. It has its own controller, and then it has its agents around the cars that are connected directly to this, uh, controller or, or processor. The, the main issue with domain architecture is really the cable harness, because now you have many, many cables that running back and forth inside the car.

And when we talk on cables, we are talking on weight. Okay? I dunno if, uh, people don't even realize this, but cables are the third heaviest component inside the car after the engine in the chassis.

Uh, in addition, it's cost okay. To, uh, install all those cables. It's very costly, okay?

You need to have an inventory and then, uh, you cannot have robots installing those cars. You have people that need to actually run those cables in the car. So it's also a matter of, of cost.

Um, so the next transition that we see after 2025 is the transition from application centric into what we call data and software centric. And this transition also include a change in the network inside the car, moving from domain architecture to zone architecture. So solar architecture means that the, the OEM divide the car to geographical zones.

Okay? Like two in the front, two in the back, you know, maybe one in the center. And in each zones you have ethernet switch that aggregate the traffic from all the agents of the different domain in that zone and convert it to ethernet high speed ethernet that run on single thin low cost and, and low weight cable.

Okay? And, and this is really the backbone of the car. So by moving to ZA architecture, you reduce dramatically, you know, the cables, the number of cables and the weight of the cables in the car.

But OE have also realized that solar architecture provide them more intelligent that they couldn't have before in the network. Okay. That related, for example, to central compute that was not possible with domain architecture or even to central storage.

So the then ethernet is, as you can, uh, understand, is the key technology for Z architecture. Okay? Now everything is running in zonal over the back on ethernet in the backbone.

And, uh, these are the products that Marvell is developing today, the switches, the five, the bridges to serve both the existing domain architecture, but also the future zone architecture. That's really interesting. So you're making the, uh, you're making the cars lighter, more cost effective and more efficient, essentially.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. And probably more power efficient as well, which is good. Um, so what's, what's the mood been, uh, with the, uh, the automotive OEMs and the platform vendors?

Um, and also I guess, you know, since we're talking about markets, can you give us some, some numbers or some sense of scale, what the opportunity looks like, uh, for the industry, for the automotive industry, but also for more bell specifically. Okay. So I, I would start with the mode of the OEM for new technology.

And I think today it's anywhere between, uh, hot to, to burning hot. They are really looking for more technology to add to the car. And the reason is that they want to differentiate.

And I want to explain a little bit more, especially when we are talking on the tr the mega trend right now, the transition into a electric vehicle. So if you look on what is electric vehicle, I mean the, the basic is pretty much the same. It's battery on wheels.

Okay? You have the battery, okay? And you have the wheels, the engines, okay?

The electric engine that come with the battery. So if between OE em, it's very hard to differentiate. Okay?

So some is differentiate on the saying, Hey, we can drive longer with the single charge. Okay, the range. But this is not really a differentiation because if you want to buy a car that can drive longer on a single charge, you need to pay more.

Okay? So it's more expensive batteries and, you know, expensive engines that come with it. Um, some are talking about the acceleration of the car.

Hey, AI can accelerate from zero to 60 mile per hour or a hundred kilometer per hours, you know, in two seconds, three seconds for most of the people that don't care about it. Okay? So now the, the OEM try to realize, okay, how can I differentiate the, you know, from the other OEM and they all realize that it's all going to be through the electronics and the software inside the car.

Uh, a good example for this is probably the new trend that you mentioned in the beginning, the software defined vehicle, okay? To build the car in a way that over time you can download new application okay. And add more value to the car.

And we believe that this going to be a very successful mega trend, uh, because all the stakeholders really enjoy it. Okay? To start with the, the OEM, for the OEM, it's a new, new generation of revenues.

After they already sold you the car, they can get more revenues. Uh, there is some estimation in the market that says that this market going to be something in the range of $450 billion per year. So obviously every OEM want to take share of the, of that market for the owner of the car.

It's also a very big benefit to have an SDV car because over time they can keep the value of the car by adding more new application. Okay? So the car value is not declining as it is today.

And the same for the care, you know, the carrier provider, for them it's high bandwidths, okay. That we need in order to serve all these applications. So everyone enjoyed this mega trend and that that's why we believe this will happen, uh, very quickly.

Now, you ask about the size of the market. Um, the transition to zoar architecture means that you have many more switches with many more ethernet ports, and that effect dramatically the growth of the shipment of ethernet ports to automotive. And, uh, uh, what we see that this market, the automotive, uh, uh, ethernet ports is going to, uh, grow in a rate CR of about 20 to 28% year to year in the next six to seven years.

Uh, so just to compare, you know, to the rest of the ethernet world, the wired ethernet, okay, and I'm talking data center, you know, enterprise carrier, SNB, if you take all the ports that are shipped in into this, uh, uh, world, you know, of ethernet, that that is not automotive, uh, today they're higher than the automotive. Okay? We are talking about a billion ports per year, but the growth is very slow.

It's growing about 3% year to year. So based on our model, you know, anywhere between 2026 to 2028, the automotive, uh, uh, ethernet world, we will need, we will ship more ports, uh, into this, uh, sector than the rest. The whole world of ethernet today, the wired ethernet, and of course that get everyone very excited.

Okay. Very exciting because it's, it's, you know, it's a lot of revenue for many companies, good competition, a lot of innovation. And, and this is the market that we want to, uh, play in and, and, uh, we are growing very fast in this market as of today.

Right? No, that's, that's really exciting. Those numbers are, those numbers are amazing.

Uh, one last quick, very quick question because that's all we have the time for is, uh, is about AI talking about mega trends, uh, that also impact automotive. Will ethernet impact ai, and obviously, are we going to see AI cars, uh, 30 seconds, your thoughts? Okay, so first of all, AI is already used today in the car, okay.

To start with autonomous cars, okay. Autonomous cars use now use special chips to, uh, you know, for the video analysis, the what's called inference. And, and these are all done with ai.

Uh, we have voice recognition that is using ai. We have a predictive maintenance that OEM are using today, AI in order to improve this, uh, service. So AI already exists in the car.

What ethernet enabled is to accelerate the adoption of AI into this car, all these application by providing very high speed, secured with high quality of service links, okay. That are essential for the success of all these, uh, new applications inside the car. Excellent.

Well, that's all the time we have, unfortunately. So Amir, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today and telling us about what Marvell is doing in the automotive space. And for everybody watching, thanks for your time and enjoy the rest of the sessions.