Today, Silicon Valley-based startup Ethernovia, Inc. announced the sampling of a scalable family of automotive PHYs (physical layer transceivers) that scale from 10 to 1 Gbps over 15 m of automotive cabling at the industry’s lowest power, critical for software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and to deliver the highest level of safety for the next generation of intelligent driving systems and data-rich services.

The ENT11100 and ENT11025 are said to be the only PHY devices that support 10 Gbps, 5 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps, and 1Gbps in the same product to meet the rising data demands of SDV features including advanced driver assistance systems, autonomy, and over-the-air software updates while simultaneously simplifying thermal design.

“As demands for the vehicle of the future continue to rise—greater safety, full autonomy, long-range electrification, and more—vehicular bandwidth demands rise commensurately,” said Ramin Shirani, Ethernovia’s co-founder and CEO. “Our PHY family will be integral to making that future vehicle a reality, not only in meeting these rising demands but doing so while setting a new benchmark for in-vehicle network energy efficiency.”

Ethernovia was co-founded in 2018 by Shirani and a team of experienced semiconductor innovators including Roy Myers, Senior Vice President of Engineering; Hossein Sederat, Chief Technology Officer; and Darren Engelkemier, Vice President of Silicon Engineering. Today, the company’s executive team also includes Christopher Mash, Vice President of Business Development, and Klaas Bult, Vice President of Data Acquisition.

“Electrification, increasing connectivity demands, and the advancement of automated driving functions result in ever-increasing requirements on fast and secure data transmission in the vehicle and to the cloud,” said Andreas Aal at Volkswagen Group. “Ethernovia’s new PHY meets these demands by offering energy-efficient, high-bandwidth, low-latency data transmission paired with embedded co-optimized safety, and security IP to enable a seamless and holistic architecture transition that paves the way up to future software-defined vehicles.”

The single port ENT11100 and ENT11025 are now sampling to customers, with the quad port devices sampling later this year. The devices are the automotive semiconductor company’s first in a planned family of products encompassing a holistic hardware and software system for the next generation of centralized vehicle architectures.

According to Mash, speaking to Futurride at CES 2024, Ethernovia has been sampling silicon for customers for a year and a half. The PHY device is a production candidate that several OEMs and Tier Ones are investigating, after which it is expected to move into a series production program.

 

Continental switch partnership

That family will include a high-bandwidth, low-latency switch in the 7-nm process currently being developed in a strategic partnership announced in September with leading supplier Continental to efficiently and securely move data within SDVs. Initially, the partners will work together to make the switch for series use in high-performance computers developed by Continental. Then they intend to collaborate on the development of a highly integrated network chip for automotive use.

“With Ethernovia, we have the perfect partner at our side to develop a particularly innovative and urgently needed technology solution for the mobility of the future,” said Jean-Francois Tarabbia, Head of Architecture and Networking Business Area at Continental.

New vehicle functions are driving an increase in computing power with an increased amount of data to be acted upon, with conventional computing topologies reaching the limits of their performance, he explained. “With the new approach of a switch tailored to meet the needs of the automotive customers, in combination with innovative design of high-performance computers, we can offer our customers an effective, power efficient, and cost-efficient solution.”

Continental and Ethernovia expect the new switching technology to deliver solutions for accelerating data exchange within vehicles as connectivity solutions, new driver assistance systems, and highly automated and future autonomous driving functions all require exchanging and processing more data in near real-time.

 

Financing high-speed connectivity

As vehicle architectures evolve from domain-centric controllers, networking solutions must also evolve to support higher data rates of advanced vehicle applications while meeting the demand for improved reliability and security. Ethernovia is developing a holistic and streamlined hardware and software system that meets this demand by integrating advanced networking features targeting the future of SDVs.

Industry-leading investors have given a vote of confidence in Ethernovia’s technology and vision for the future of the connected car. In May 2023, Ethernovia announced the completion of a $64 million Series A funding round with investors including Porsche Automobile Holding SE, Qualcomm Ventures, VentureTech Alliance, AMD Ventures, Western Digital Capital, Fall Line Capital, Taiwania Capital, and ENEA Capital.

“We take great pride in developing the cutting-edge network architecture to power the car of the future,” said Shirani. “These innovations set a new industry expectation in what can be achieved in meeting the cost, power, and flexibility that car manufacturers and consumers demand in new vehicles.”

According to a recent report from market research organization Future Market Insights, the global automotive connectivity market is expected to grow from $33.42 billion to $190.29 billion from 2023 to 2033. The report attributes that growth to several factors including tightening safety regulations, increased sales of luxury vehicles, the advent of 5G infrastructure, the rise of vehicle autonomy, and the “increasing prevalence of integrated connectivity” championed by Ethernovia.

The trends toward electrification, connectivity, and automated driving result in ever-increasing requirements for fast and secure data transmission from a variety of sources in vehicles and to the cloud, said Lutz Meschke, Porsche SE board of management member responsible for investment management. “To address these central challenges of automotive transformation, Ethernovia offers technologically leading, integrated Ethernet chips with high bandwidth and advanced security solutions for the energy-efficient processing of large amounts of data.”

“Ethernovia’s solution transforms the automobile’s communication network by providing a reliable, standards-based, high-speed connectivity needed to enable the software-defined vehicle,” added Carlos Kokron, Vice President, of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Managing Director, of Qualcomm Ventures Americas.

 

Chasing centralization—and Tesla

The accelerating trend in the centralization of vehicle E/E networks goes hand-in-hand with software-defined vehicle developments enabled by Ethernovia’s technology, according to Mash. The company is helping its OEM customers move along the path of decoupling hardware and software development, but that transition is proving challenging.

“Most OEM architectures today are pretty hard-coded,” said Mash. “The trend was to put a CPU or a microcontroller in that only did what was feasible, so it’s difficult to change as we go forward. What we see now is that the OEMs realize they need additional processing capacity and ECUs with spare resources that can then be used for software and future updates.”

The new architectures are also being driven by the move from ICE (internal combustion engine) to EV (electric vehicle) architectures.

“It’s not a blank sheet of paper completely, but it gives the OEMs a way of saying ‘let’s put a new architecture in place that is more aligned with software,’” added Mash. “We see a move, by maybe one or two lead OEMs,” who are chasing [market leader] Tesla “but trying to get there pretty quickly.”

However, the bar is moving quickly regarding the consolidation of networks. With the Cybertruck, Shirani believes Tesla is 10 years ahead in networking to go with its software advantage. The Tesla vehicle’s ring of Ethernet is very similar to the layout Ethernovia has been advocating with the industry and showed Futurride in a June 2023 briefing at Informa‘s AutoTech Detroit.

Mash says that industry teardowns of the Cybertruck show that his previous company, Marvell Technology, had a hand in some of the vehicle’s networking advances.

“These kind of ring topologies enable the redundancy we’ve been talking about for many years,” he said. “It’s very much aligned with the vision that we have.”

The company offers a comprehensive range of automotive Ethernet solutions spanning not only PHY transceivers for transmitting and receiving data along the single-pair wiring harness and highly integrated automotive switches but also packet processors responsible for aggregating, accelerating, and ensuring deterministic transport of data. These devices together create the “nervous system of the car” enabling the software-defined vehicle while delivering a high level of safety for the next generation of intelligent driving systems and data-rich services.