48 Technology focus | Data storage enable multitasking and centralising of automotive architectures, which are increasingly critical as today’s software-defined vehicles work across multiple SoCs and virtual machines to handle diverse workloads across in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) to ADAS and AI-enabled cabin experiences. As most automotive storage drives can only connect to one SoC, they tend to either get placed locally with each system, leading to inefficient use of bits and space, or require the use of an expensive PCIe switch. An alternative approach for sharing storage across SoCs relies on a costly, automotive-grade PCIe switch to connect a storage drive to multiple SoCs. These are often power-hungry and eat up valuable board space. The multi-port capability eliminates the need for a switch, giving carmakers more design flexibility in their vehicle while reducing heat and power consumption in the design. The ability to connect multiple SoCs also alleviates the need to keep redundant copies of data, and the savings can be significant. For example, navigational data for a single city alone can be up to 100 GB, and it is often shared by ADAS and IVI systems, but existing approaches require this data to be stored at least twice within the vehicle, with local storage tied to each SoC. Multiply that by however many cities and that is hundreds of unnecessary gigabytes of storage. The key to the quad-port SSD is a single-root input/output virtualisation (SR-IOV). This SR-IOV capability provides high performance for heavy, multi-host workloads of up to 64 virtual machines (VMs) to give each SoC and its VMs an isolated storage region for local processing, while sharing a pool of storage, maximising efficiency. This support for multi-host workloads is essential as today’s automotive SoCs increasingly use VMs to multitask across different functions, from autonomous driving to vehicle-tovehicle communication. The SR-IOV capability offers an advantage by directing input/outputs (I/Os) directly from the VMs to the SSD hardware, contrasting with typical paravirtualisation, where I/Os are routed through a software hypervisor to the SSD, creating latency. By bypassing the software layer, the drive improves the random read performance by a factor of three. Virtualisation also enables increased security for carmakers. Based on the SR-IOV virtualisation, the data of each VM is isolated from others in the hardware to mitigate data or code leakage while curtailing hacking attempts in one VM from compromising another, thus maintaining critical data privacy and security. The quad ports provide multiple independent data paths, allowing concurrent communication with the host system. They can be allocated to different VMs or workloads, ensuring strict isolation of data traffic to separate latency-sensitive applications or high-throughput workloads. Each VM can have its own isolated storage region, or namespace, to store and access data, while sharing a pool of data with others. System architects can selectively allocate ports, ensuring critical data remains isolated The iNAND UFS solid-state drive (Image courtesy of Western Digital) The ability to connect multiple SoCs alleviates the need to keep redundant copies of data, and the savings can be significant June/July 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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