In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, we address the topic of Automotive Ethernet innovation and why it is essential to meeting the fast-evolving demands of automotive switches that support the zonal architectures of next-generation software-defined vehicles. Optimized for the most advanced automotive architectures, the BrightLane Q6223 switch delivers 90 Gbps of bandwidth, nearly double the capacity of today’s available automotive switches.
The new switch family also includes a combination of advanced security features not found together in any other automotive switch product. The Brightlane Q622x family incorporates IEEE 802.1AE-2018-compliant Media Access Control (MACsec) link security on every port, up to 10G, for encrypting data traveling between automotive components to prevent man-in-the-middle and other attacks. Marvell’s patent-pending Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) implementation for DPI provides for wire-speed packet classification to ensure packet validity and the ability to filter and classify more than 4,000 IPv4/IPv6 flows for heightened intrusion detection. Moreover, the Q622x family incorporates a hardware security module (HSM) for encryption, MACsec key management and trusted boot functionality to further secure the in-vehicle network.
My guest today is Amir Bar-Niv, VP of of Marketing, Automotive at Marvell Technology, a top-tier semiconductor company. Amir is a new guest on this show, and incisively shares his insights and perspective on the direction of the Automotive Ethernet switching market segment and its vital role across software-defined vehicle environments.
To start our discussion, we highlighted the ongoing major transformation of the global automotive industry including the swift uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) and how impactful the software-defined vehicle trend is driving Ethernet networking adoption across car manufacturers and the automotive ecosystem.
Our conversation drilled down on the following major topics:
- Why auto manufacturers are strategically committed to using central automotive Ethernet switches for in-vehicle networks.
- How Marvell is optimally positioned to drive Automotive Ethernet technology and zonal architecture adoption.
- The ways Marvell is attaining and maintaining its sharp competitive advantages as competition intensifies in the automotive switch segment of the next-generation software-defined vehicle market.
- Marvell’s introduction of its new central switch, MV-Q6222, and its influence on accelerating zonal architecture implementation.
- What Marvell is doing to mitigate security risks as the complexity of hardware and software in automobiles increases.
- Why the growth potential for Ethernet in vehicles is substantial beyond the current changes in the car network.
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Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Futurum Tech podcast. I’m your host, Ron Westfall, Research Director and Senior Analyst at Futurum Research. And in this episode we’re going to be talking about automotive ethernet switching technology. We’re going to be talking about software defined vehicle innovation, and so much more here with my esteemed colleague, Amir Bar-Niv of Marvell Technology. Good day, Amir. How’s it going?
Amir Bar-Niv: Oh great, Ron. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you for having us in this important episode and looking forward to it.
Ron Westfall: Naturally. I couldn’t agree more and I have no doubt that folks out there are keen to know more about you and Marvell’s portfolio strategy in the automotive segment. Can you tell us about yourself and about Marvell’s Automotive Group?
Amir Bar-Niv: Sure do. I’ll start with myself. I’m the Vice President of the Automotive business unit in Marvell. Joined Marvell about four years ago with the acquisition of Aquantia and maybe a little bit on the history of Marvell in automotive. Marvell started to make products for automotive in 2005. They did some storage, they did some WiFi, but these were all opportunistic. Everything changed in Marvell with regard to automotive when Matt Murphy joined the company in 2016 as the CEO. Matt has a lot of experience, had a lot of experience in the automotive industry and he understood the potential. Very quickly he decided that automotive need to be a major part of Marvell products. He hired the highly talented general manager, Will Chu, that ran this group and everything after then, it’s all history.
Right now it’s the fastest growing business in Marvell and we are aiming to become the biggest in-vehicle network semiconductor company in the world in the near future. In Marvell, we developed now we have the new brand name called Brightlane, and under this brand name we are developing today the automotive ethernet products, switches, fires, and bridges. But really for Marvell it’s all about leveraging technology and AP and we are planning to leverage other technologies and know how that was developed in the company related to compute, to storage, to security for future products that we are going to introduce into the automotive world.
Ron Westfall: I think we are witnessing a major transformation of the automotive industry such as the rapid uptake of EVs. Now can you share with us your view of what’s going on with this transformation?
Amir Bar-Niv: Sure do. I think we are all aware of the big mega trends that are going on right now in this industry. The electrical vehicle that you cannot even call it a mega trend, it’s happening already. It’s transition, the whole automotive industry is transitioning in this direction. But then there is the other mega trend, like the autonomous car, the connected car, and the software defined vehicle. But what I really want to talk about is the transformation that we see that more has to do with data and content inside the car. Until 2015, the average car was what we called device centric. In those cars we used to have devices like GPS, like the CD and the radio. Each one was totally autonomous with its own controller, with a very low share of information between those devices.
Starting in 2015 and as a matter of fact it’s going all the way to 2025, we are now moving to what we call application centric cars where we have applications that unite under many different functions. For example, infotainment, where you have the GPS, the audio, the content that is downloaded to the car, CarPlay or Android that are used as the operating system. We have the ADAS that is used for lane departure, lane keeping, and then the dynamic cruise control or automatic braking. These are applications that again develop all the different functions that are needed to serve this specific or unique target in the car under this application. But from 2025, we are moving now into a different type of cars that we call data and software centric.
These are the cars that have the hardware, meaning the processor, the storage, and the network, that enable it to download new applications into the car over time. This is the whole premise of a software defined vehicle. That’s a buzzword that everyone now is using. And with that we see a major change in the way the car has been architected and been developed and the amount of hardware, the hardware content inside the car that is needed in order to support this transformation.
Ron Westfall: Now Amir, you mentioned “software defined vehicle”, that just jumps right out. From your perspective, is this a real trend or is this just wishful thinking on the part of the car manufacturers and the OEMs out there?
Amir Bar-Niv: Very good question. Maybe first we’ll explain what software defined vehicle is all about for the listeners that are less familiar with it. Unlike the cars of today, what we call the traditional car that you buy from the dealer that already include all the capabilities and the applications and the features in the car when you buy it, the future car or software-defined vehicle will enable to download overtime enhancement or new application into the car when it’s available or when the car owner need them. You don’t need to pay everything on the day you buy the car. You can add more features when you need them and when they are available.
We believe that this is going to be a very successful trend because all the stakeholders that are involved in this transformation enjoy it and gain from it. To start with, it’s the OEM. For the OEM, it’s a new stream of revenues that don’t exist today in the car that they are selling out of the door. The size of this market is estimated to be in the range of $450 billion for software that can be downloaded over the air into the car and obviously every OEM wants to take share of this huge amount of revenues. In addition, for the car owner, it’s a very important feature and capability because it helps them to keep the value of the car over time.
So you can a year later or two years there or five year later download new application and then you have the value of the car maintained and keep them and reduce the degradation of the value of the car over time. Then it’s the provider of the content to the car, the service provider, that they really enjoy the high bandwidth that will be needed in those cars in the future in order to better serve these new applications. This is what we call the win-win-win and that’s a reason that we believe that this is going to be a very successful trend in the next few years.
Ron Westfall: That’s great news, Amir. I mean, the triple win scenario is something that everybody can appreciate. And with that we can drill down to the networking and ethernet aspects. How does the software defined vehicle affect the network in the car?
Amir Bar-Niv: Very good question. If we look at the cars of today, these cars are characterized by what we call domain architecture. We have in the car a few domains like infotainment, like ADAS, like body. Each domain has its own CPU, its own controller and it’s connected to all its agents around the car that are connected with cables directly to this central ECU. If we think on three or four or sometimes five domains, it means that we had tons of cables running all over the car back and forth to connect all the agents of each domain to its central controller. I like to give the example that VW announced a few years ago that on a midsize car like Golf GTI, if you take all the cables in the car and connect them back to back, you will get cable lengths of 1.5 kilometers.
And for the car manufacturers it means cost, the cost of cable, it means also weight. Those cables weigh a lot. And when you start to talk about EV cars, that means reducing the range of the car with the higher weight. The OEMs started to work on a new architecture a few years back that was called zone architecture. In the zone architecture we are dividing the car into zones and in each zone you have an ethernet switch that connects to all the agents of all the different domains in that zone with very short cables. And from there we aggregate all the traffic on a single pair thin ethernet cable that is really the backbone of the car and can connect all the zones including the central switch. And here what we are gaining, of course it’s all network based, it’s including the security that is part of the network now, the internet backbone.
It gives you scalability, you can easily add domains, remove domains. When you’re moving from the high end car to the low end car, you can decide that the high end car has six domains. In the mid car, mid-size you have four. In the low end car you have two. Very easy to play with it because it’s all internet based, but it also adds a lot of intelligence into the network. For example, the capability to use as part of the zone architecture, central compute, and even central storage that will control all the different domains inside the car.
Ron Westfall: Well, this innovation sounds very great and encouraging, however, from my perspective, car makers are notoriously slow and cautious. What makes you believe that this development won’t stall out, so to speak? What is it that’s going to be different this time in terms of making the ecosystem more successful and making these innovations effective?
Amir Bar-Niv: That’s a very good question because no doubt there is an investment that OEM need to make inside the car. Adding all these switches in the zones, this is something that they didn’t have so far. Until a few years ago it was really a question of if and when, okay? This transition will happen. However, I have to say that there is a very interesting survey that was done by one of the biggest tier one in the world that chatted with us and I presented it already in some conferences, that they basically did the survey with about 25 biggest OEM and asked them when they’re going to transition into zonal.
And in this survey it shows that by 2026, 60% of the OEM is already moving to zonal architecture. Now that was a survey that they did in 2021. They did the survey again in 2022 and then they found out that by 2026, 80% of the OEM said they’re going to move to zone architecture and by 2029 it was close to 96%. I think the question of if and when doesn’t exist anymore, it’s happening right now as we speak and we are of course gaining from this transition because it means more content in the car, especially for ethernet. And this is what the product that we are bringing to the market.
Ron Westfall: Well, that’s great news that zonal architectures are pretty much going to become across the board adopted by the car manufacturers. And so what does this mean for Marvell? Now how is Marvell quite simply going to enjoy this transformation?
Amir Bar-Niv: So first of all, it’s really the growth of ethernet ports inside the car. What we see right now is that there are more cars that are adopting ethernet, especially when they’re transitioning into zonal architecture, and also the content of it, the number of ports per car is growing. Overall this is a very fast growing market for us. We’re talking about a market with a number of ports that are shipped to the car industry, that growth in the range of about 25% from now. And if you look at the next few years, we are talking about over a billion ports of ethernet to be shipped by 2025 already into this market.
And of course this is what Marvell is doing, an ethernet product for automotive. And if you look on the content per car of silicone for the in vehicle network, this is our market. We see the growth where it used to be in domain architecture, it used to be something in the range of $30 for a typical car that use the internet product. Moving to zonal, it’s more than doubled itself. And when we are talking on zonal that also including the software defined vehicle promise, all the hardware that is needed for that, we are talking way over a hundred dollars per car for Marvell type of component for the in vehicle network.
Ron Westfall: Amir, that sounds like such a big market and it’s clearly growing fast. Now I’m expecting a lot of competition for Marvell. From your perspective, how does Marvell maintain its leadership in this dynamic market?
Amir Bar-Niv: So I think we need to start first of all with the baseline. Okay, this is the ethernet technology that is being used for automotive. Marvell has been doing ethernet products for more than 25 years. Today we have more than a thousand engineers just developing ethernet technologies and IPs that we are leveraging for the automotive market. We have in Marvell more than 2000 patents just for the ethernet. That of course is a very important part of our IP portfolio. Then it’s all about the portfolio. We now have the full portfolio for our customers, including switches from low, mid and high port count, files that run anywhere from a hundred megabit to 10 gigabit per second.
Then soon we are also going to have 25 gigabit per second. This is what we call the one-stop shop for our customers that we can give them any product that they need in order to build the next generation of vehicles and networks. But this is also related to the strategy. Okay? Marvell’s strategy is to be first in the market with the important technologies for our customers within the next few years. We were the first one to introduce a secured switch in the automotive market. We’re the first one to sample the gigabit thousand based D1-PHY, we’re the first one to sample 10 gigabit based D1-PHYs. And we were the first one also to introduce last year the camera bridge, which in the future will enable the cameras in the car to run over the automotive ethernet backbone.
Ron Westfall: Well, speaking of new Marvell portfolio offerings, you just introduced a new central switch, the MVQ-6222. Now is this another switch for the zonal architecture? What can we expect from this new offering?
Amir Bar-Niv: Yeah, it is. This switch is a central switch. As a matter of fact, there are two products in this family, the 6222 and the 6223, which are the 60 gig and the 90 gigabit per second bandwidth switches that we just introduced into the market. And again, being first in the market to introduce such a high bandwidth switch for the central of the zonal architecture. This switch is I think more than twice in bandwidth than any other existing switches in the market today. And it’s aiming again to be the central switch that connects between all the zones. When there is information that needs to be sent from one zone to another, it’s done through the central switch, but also aggregate the traffic from all the zones into the central SOCs like the ADAS and infotainment. And this is a switch that we just announced and we are sampling it to customers already.
Ron Westfall: The timing of the new switch is most welcomed because with the increased complexity of the hardware and software and the cars and there’s also major concerns related to security. In this important regard, what is Marvell doing to mitigate these risks to take care of the security concerns that are out there?
Amir Bar-Niv: Excellent question. Security obviously is a major concern of the OEM and the tier one moving forward, especially with cars, the SDV car software defined vehicle, that will enable it to download new application into the car. Maybe we should first talk about the attack vectors that we see right now in the car that has to do with the hardware, which is what we are bringing into the car. In a typical switch, you have the capability to program the switch behavior inside the car over the air. When we’re talking about software defined vehicles, everyone is talking about the new software for the CPU, for the central processing.
But in many cases you also want to change the behavior of the network to better serve the new application. And this is where you need to update the firmware inside the switch and you do it through external flash that is connected to the switch where we are going to download new firmware and we need to be able to authenticate, encrypt, and authenticate the content of this firmware to make sure that hackers will not try to download malicious or firmware that really manipulate the behavior of the switch and create risk hazards inside the car.
So this is the first attack vector and we are doing it already in our switches, authenticating the framework. The second attack is really related to the device authentications inside the car. When the switch is connected to all the devices, you want to make sure that none of them again is a malicious device that’s somehow inserted into the car. The switch has the capability to authenticate all the devices that are connected to it and basically disconnect from those that it cannot authenticate and doesn’t understand the source of this device. The last one has to do with the data exchange that is going inside the network that again needs to be authenticated and encrypted to make sure that hackers cannot access this data with means like man in the middle or replay of packets. There are many mechanisms that can prevent the network to behave as it should inside the network.
And we should protect ourselves from all these vector attacks. In our switches we already implemented a very important feature called MACsec. MACsec, it’s an IEEE feature that’s already been proven on millions or many billions of ports in the data center and enterprise. And now we are leveraging this for the automotive. This is a standard feature. It’s designed, it’s developed in IEEE, and this enabled to authenticate and encrypt data that are running between our switches to our files on the other side. In Marvell, all the files and all the switches now include MACsec. In addition, in order to be able to encrypt data, you need to make sure that you have keys that you are using in order to do the encryption. You don’t want to download those keys from the outside of the car because then hackers can find ways to access those keys.
So in our switches we have a module called HSM that is generating and distributing the keys to all the devices inside the network. Then the third layer of protection has to do with internal hardware that is called TCAM. That is a hardware that can filter the data, that can monitor, do what we call deep packet inspection on the packets that are running inside the switch. And by that they can do what we call whitelisting or blacklisting, meaning identify some addresses from devices that are not recognized and then disable all traffic from those devices. All these features, the MACsec, the HSM module, and the TCAM, are now part of our new generation of switches and are there in order to protect the car from hackers and other types of threats.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, the Marvell security protections are essential. It’s something that all the car manufacturers have to have. This is good to know that Marvell is making this very important contribution to the ecosystem. And with that in mind, Amir, beyond the current changes that are going on in the car network, is there any additional future potential growth for ethernet in the vehicle itself?
Amir Bar-Niv: Excellent question. The way I see it, this is only the beginning because what we talked about right now is on all the different components in the car that we are connecting through the zonal architecture like actuation, like infotainment, some ADAS capabilities. But there is the next level of components that are not connected yet through ethernet. For example, the cameras. Cameras are today connected point to point directly to the SOC devices. The reason is that camera traffic is very high speed. This is uncompressed video from the cameras in the speed of multi gig and ethernet until lately, I would say until a few years ago, didn’t have enough bandwidth in order to support this high speed traffic from the cameras.
The video. However, with the new introduction of 10 gigabit ethernet and in the near future there also going to be 25 gigabit internet links inside the car, now you can connect, you can drive the camera output directly over ethernet links and connect them directly to the zonal switches. That’s one new area that we’re going to attack in the near future. That’s going to add a lot of content for the ethernet inside the car. The other one is the displays. Displays, again, another driver of very high content, very high speed video inside the car. And today again, they’re connected with some point to point legacy technologies.
And now ethernet is also going to replace this connection inside the car. All the displays, and we are talking about in the future cars anywhere between three to six displays in the car and all of them will be connected through the internet network. On top of it’s the storage, okay? That right now it’s distributed for all the ECUs and in the future it will be central storage that is internet based and connected to the network and everything will be connected to this storage inside the car. The growth and the future of ethernet in the car is still going to be very big. And again, for us, a very attractive market to go after.
Ron Westfall: Well, that just sounds great. The future is definitely looking up in terms of automotive ethernet innovation. And on that positive note, thank you so much Amir, for joining our webcast today and-
Amir Bar-Niv: Thank you very much.
Ron Westfall: No problem.
Amir Bar-Niv: Thank you very much, Ron. It was a pleasure talking to you and hopefully our audience will find all this information interesting and intriguing.
Ron Westfall: I believe so. And that’s a definite thumbs up. Looking forward to another conversation in the future. And with that, everybody, thank you so much for tuning into our episode. Hit that subscribe button and join us for all of our shows here on the Futurum Tech Podcast. We appreciate you all tuning in and for this episode, thank you so much. We’ll see you all later.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Marvell Accelerates Automotive Zonal Architectural Cause with Brightlane Q622x Switch Debut
Marvell Fiscal Q1 2024: AI and ASICs are Marvell’s Shining Stars
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
