Infineon Unveils Powerful and Scalable XC2300 Microcontroller Family for Future Safety Standards; Automotive Airbag and Power-Steering Safety Applications Targeted

Neubiberg, Germany – July 19, 2007 – Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) today revealed a new microcontroller family specifically designed for use in vehicle safety applications, specifically targeted for airbag systems and electronic power-steering applications. The new Infineon XC2300 family of microcontrollers (MCUs) provides 32-bit performance and a rich peripheral feature set required for present and future safety applications requiring fast reaction time, redundancy and flexibility.

The introduction of this MCU family demonstrates that Infineon is able to offer complete chip solutions for airbag systems and power-steering applications combined with in-depth application know-how. The Infineon solution of MCU, sensor and power semiconductor offers automotive system suppliers the opportunity to improve their system reliability and reduce development time.

Automotive safety systems incorporating XC2300 products have the potential to be certified according to the new SIL3 (Safety Integrity Level) standard (IEC 61508). This standard for safety systems is presently being discussed by the automotive industry and is about to take a hold in Europe beginning in 2008.

“The safety segment is the strongest-growing automotive application area with about a 10 percent growth-rate for the next five years. Infineon’s combined in-house offering of MCU, sensor and power semiconductors together with our broad system know-how for safety applications make us unique among automotive chip suppliers,” said Peter Bauer, Member of the Management Board and Head of the Automotive, Industrial and Multimarket business group at Infineon Technologies. “System suppliers and car manufacturers benefit from our complete solutions, which are cost-effective and fulfill the stringent quality requirements and safety standards of the automotive industry.”
XC2300 Family Features 32-bit Performance with Powerful Peripheral Set

The XC2300 family is designed to enable scalability, hardware and software reuse and compatibility across automotive electronics safety systems. The product family features a high-performance central processing unit (CPU) that can process up to 80 million instructions per second (MIPS) at 80 MHz.

The flexible USIC (Universal Serial Interface Channel) of the XC2300 family can be configured as UART (Universal Asynchronous Receive Transmit), LIN (Local Interconnect Network), buffered SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), IIC (Inter-IC) Bus, or IIS (Inter-IC-Sound) interface. In addition, the MultiCAN (CAN Rev. 2.0B active) provides up to 64 flexibly assignable message objects on up to three CAN nodes and gateway functionalities.

The two parallel A/D converters lead to high performance with up to 24-channels, optional data pre-processing and a conversion time down to 1.2 µs. The A/D converters have specific safety features such as the ability to detect broken connections and to synchronize the two A/D converters to redundantly sample incoming signals.

The Memory Protection Unit (MPU) offers an additional benefit to the developers of safety systems by allowing the integration of software from third party suppliers (e.g. AUTOSAR) into a protected execution environment. The different software components can be fully encapsulated by providing memory and time protection features so that safety and non-safety critical applications can be executed coherently within “trusted” and “untrusted” execution domains. In this case, the MPU controls the encapsulation of the different software tasks and provides a reliable mechanism for avoiding any interferences. Significant savings can be made in the software development process if most tasks can be classed as ”untrusted” and only safety-critical tasks are required to be engineered at a higher “trusted” level.

The low power consumption of the XC2300 products (less than 60 mA at maximum performance of 80MHz) reduces system costs since only tiny voltage regulators are needed.

The members of the XC2300 family will feature between 128 kBytes and 1.6 MBytes of flash memory to fit both e.g. airbag systems and highly complex safety-systems such as power steering, low-end chassis control and sensor clusters.
Further characteristics include AUTOSAR compliance with Infineon supporting software standardization for interfaces and software modules for automotive systems by providing AUTOSAR software drivers for all XC2300 products.

XC2300 family features high scalability

The broad XC2300 product portfolio is planned to comprise more than 50 products, offering safety application design engineers 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. Once the software is compiled for Infineon’s XC2300 microcontrollers, it can easily be used for various safety applications within different model platforms of a car manufacturer. Overall cost savings in development, qualification, validation and testing of hardware and software can be up to 30 percent.

Dedicated Safety Features of XC2300 Family

For safety critical applications such as airbags, steering or braking, the highest degree of reliability is an absolute must for all system components.

All components of the XC2300 family are specifically designed to fulfill these strong safety requirements, and include a set of safety relevant features, such as ECC (Error Correction Code) on all memories, memory protection, feature redundancy and several control mechanisms including CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check). These features are essential for all XC2300 products to support and enable a system meeting the requirements of IEC 61508 (SIL3).

XC2300 Products Launched

Today, Infineon is introducing the first two XC2300 family members, the XC2365 and the XC2387, with a total of 16 software-compatible and pin-compatible products. Family members vary according to flash memory size (384kBytes, 448kBytes and 576kBytes), number of ADC channels (16 or 24), frequency (66 MHz or 80 MHz), temperature range (-40°C to +85°C or -40°C to +125°C) and green (lead-free) Low-Quad Flat Pack (LQFP) package options (LQFP-100 / -144). Further versions with a flash memory sizes from 128k Bytes to 1.6 Mbytes and additional features such as FlexRay interfaces and further LQFP-packages with 64 and 176 pins will be introduced in 2008.

Development Tool Support

The XC2300 family is supported by the full suite of development tools, including evaluation boards, debuggers, compilers and documentation.

Availability and Pricing

Samples of the XC2365 and XC2387 of the XC2300 family are available for dedicated automotive customers.

Sample pricing varies according to product specification. For instance, the XC2365 with 66 MHz frequency, 384kBytes of flash memory and an automotive temperature range of -40°C to +125°C is priced at approximately Euros 5.35 (US-$ 6.95) per piece in quantities of 20,000.

Further information is available at www.infineon.com/xc2300 and at www.infineon.com/automotive

Infineon Technologies AG, Neubiberg, Germany, offers semiconductor and system solutions addressing three central challenges to modern society - energy efficiency, connectivity and security. In fiscal year 2006 (ending September), the company achieved sales of Euro 7.9 billion (including Qimonda sales of Euro 3.8 billion) with approximately 42,000 employees worldwide (including approximately 12,000 Qimonda employees). With a global presence, Infineon operates through its subsidiaries in the US from Milpitas, CA, in the Asia-Pacific region from Singapore, and in Japan from Tokyo. Infineon is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: IFX).