indie Semiconductor launches automotive wireless charging solution

The iND87200 simplifies and accelerates the development of cost-effective WPC ‘Qi’-based in-cabin portable device charging designs.

In-cabin charging has become a necessity for drivers and passengers who use their smartphone to provide navigation, music, voice connections and other services on-the-move. The global semiconductor-enabled in-car automotive wireless charger market is estimated1 at $1.3 billion for 2022 and is forecasted to grow to $9.5 billion by 2032, representing a 22% CAGR over this period.

The emerging Qi 2.0 standard featuring the Magnetic Power Profile (MPP) is particularly relevant to automotive designs, offering faster, more reliable charging by automatically aligning smartphones with an inductive charging coil, maintaining the device in position irrespective of vehicle motion.

“indie’s breakthrough automotive wireless charging solution speeds device charging times and delivers industry-leading levels of semiconductor and software integration, reducing the external bill-of-materials by almost half relative to existing discrete implementations,” said Fred Jarrar, Vice President and General Manager of indie Semiconductor's Power and USB product lines. “This turn-key architecture dramatically reduces system complexity, improves overall reliability and de-risks tier 1 time to market. As a result, indie’s latest SoC will play a pivotal role in enabling automotive OEMs to deliver faster, cost-effective, and more reliable portable device charging, contributing to an engaging in-cabin user experience spanning feature-rich cars to entry-level vehicles.”

The iND87200 dual-core design combines an Arm Cortex M4F processor with 2MB of embedded Flash and 256kB of SRAM with a dedicated Arm Cortex M0 processor for the WPC stack. This approach frees SoC compute resources to execute user-specific software without timing and interrupt constraints related to the WPC stack. Further, indie’s wireless charging solution integrates all of the necessary power management, DC/DC converter, signal conditioning, WPC inverter drivers, and power FETs as well as LED and fan drivers. A wide range of serial interfaces such as CAN 2.0B, LIN, I2C, and UARTs provide multiple connectivity options to the vehicle and other peripherals.

Fully qualified to AEC-Q100 Grade 2, the iND87200 is production released and sampling to customers. In addition to the SoC, indie is also offering advanced application-oriented reference designs to further accelerate the customer development and deployment process.