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Infineon to supply control chip for VW Golf

Chip maker Infineon Technologies says Volkswagen is to use a microcontroller designed by Infineon as the central gateway unit that controls and optimises the different electronic control units.

The chip, which delivers the performance of a 32-bit microcontroller, is a member of the XC2200 family recently unveiled by Infineon. Volkswagen will use the microcontroller on model year 2009 cars and later based on the Golf platform.

These cars need a gateway with a sixth CAN interface and at least two LIN interfaces, and Infineon is developing an XC2200 microcontroller for Volkswagen that will incorporate this functionality.

Automotive system suppliers have already begun developing new control units based on the XC2200 microcontroller. The XC2200 under design for Volkswagen’s automotive central gateway unit will be available to other automobile manufacturers.

“Volkswagen decided in favour of a microcontroller from the XC2200 family not just because of the compelling feature set but also because Infineon has built up considerable expertise over many years of serving the automotive sector,” said Jochen Hanebeck, senior vice president, microcontrollers at Infineon Technologies.

Infineon’s XC2200 microcontroller family is designed for car body applications and covers almost the entire gamut of car body and gateway applications with a single hardware and software architecture. This means, for example, that microcontrollers will be available with embedded flash memory ranging in size from 32 to 1280KB and in packages with between 64 pins and 176 pins. To help keep costs down, the microcontrollers will also feature EEPROM emulation in flash memory.

The new 16-bit product family will be manufactured using field-proven 130nm embedded flash technology, the same technology as used in Infineon’s 32-bit TriCore microcontrollers, which have been in volume production for over a year now.

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