The evolution of TriCore™

The TriCore™, Infineon’s unified RISC/MCU/DSP 32-bit processor has been evolving for more than 20 years since its introduction. Since then, Infineon has already shipped more than 500.000.000 TriCore™ to the market, and this number continues to grow.

Everything started in 1999, when Infineon launched the first generation of the AUDO (AUtomotive unifieD processOr) family, the first microcontroller to feature the TriCore™ processor. AUDO was a computational power horse and was an instant hit towards Powertrain applications.

The success of the first AUDO pushed Infineon to evolve and optimize the TriCore™ concept even further, creating 4 different generations of AUDO microcontrollers in 10 years. Thanks to its high real-time performance and embedded safety features, the TriCore™ architecture has overachieved on its target market (Engine and Transmission controller units) and has sent a clear message that it has potential to do much more.

The biggest milestone on the TriCore™ success story was the introduction of the AURIX™ multicore family. Combining easy-to-use functional safety support, a strong increase in performance and a future-proven security solution in a highly scalable product family, AURIX™ family has become the benchmark microcontroller for multiple automotive applications. These include classical powertrain applications, xEV, zone and domain controllers, chassis and safety applications, connectivity, gateways and ADAS. The AURIX™ family is one of the strongest enablers of the trend toward fully autonomous, clean and highly connected cars. TriCore™ based products have the versatility required for the industrial, CAV and transportation sector, excelling in optimized motor control applications and signal processing.

The new AURIX™ TC4x is now the 7^th microcontroller generation based on the TriCore™ architecture.  The new TriCore™ as featured in the TC4x family brings a series of advantages when compared to its predecessors, like higher frequencies, larger local memories, floating-point unit enhancements and support for virtualization. All of this whilst maintaining full backward compatibility with the AURIX™ TC3x family TriCore™.  Such improvements will broaden the versatility of the device yet further, to focus on the upcoming vehicle E/E architectures and vehicle electrification. Find out more soon!