Dongfeng Motor Corporation and U.S. based Freescale Semiconductor plan to establish a joint automotive electronics lab in China.
The lab will be aimed at jointly developing silicon, software and system-level solutions to be used in the next generation of Dongfeng Motor's vehicles for both Chinese and export markets.
The two companies intend to cooperate in developing key automotive applications, including body electronics, powertrain control, and hybrid electric vehicle technologies. The technical cooperation involves a series of Freescale microcontroller platforms, including 32-bit Power Architecture MCUs, 16-bit S12X and 8-bit S08 devices, as well as analog integrated circuits.
To date, Dongfeng has developed advanced technologies for engine control, hybrid control and automated manual transmission. One of Dongfeng's significant technology achievements is an electronic control unit development project based on Freescale's S12 MCU, which has gone into mass production. Future cooperation between the two companies is expected to focus on chassis and safety technologies, as well as in-car infotainment and navigation.
Freescale and Dongfeng plan to extend their cooperation across a wide range of automotive hardware and software technologies. For example, Dongfeng has developed an electronic engine control system based on Freescale's 32-bit MPC5xx MCUs and plans to migrate the control system design to MPC563x MCUs, a cost-effective MCU family optimized for green engine control. Joint software development and system integration are expected to be important aspects of the cooperation. The two companies plan to jointly develop underlying software and hardware platforms for ECUs, modeling tools, display panels, AUTOSAR applications, in-vehicle networking solutions and low-end body control modules.