REVEALING THE POSSIBLE CHANGES IN FUTURE AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRONICS?

I will discuss the possible changes involved from the aspects of E/E architecture, communication methods, software cooperation models, automotive buses, software architecture, and process standards. I have a relatively shallow understanding and the content will be lengthy. Welcome to comment.

1、 Automotive E/E architecture: Distributed ->Domain Centralization ->Computer

Currently, cars have dozens or even hundreds of electronic control units connected to various buses. On average, current cars use approximately 25 ECUs, but some high-end models already have over 100 ECUs. In the past, the automotive electronic and electrical architecture has always followed the distributed architecture pattern of "one function, one box". For example, the transmission control is handled by TCU, and the engine control is handled by EMS. Although these two are also in the power domain, their respective hardware and software are provided by the supplier. In this form of automotive electronic and electrical architecture, each additional function requires the corresponding controller, which involves communication and maintenance costs from multiple parties, further increasing the complexity and cost of the system. Ultimately, it will lead to a larger and more complex vehicle network and wiring, which will also affect the overall lightweight of the vehicle.

Faced with the improvement of automotive functionality and software complexity, it is necessary to restructure the automotive E/E architecture and establish a more flexible system architecture. Domain controllers have only become popular in recent years. The so-called domain refers to dividing the entire vehicle into different zones, such as the power domain, body domain, chassis domain, entertainment domain, etc. Each domain only mounts a single controller to be responsible for the functions of its own domain, reducing the complex wiring and integration of the previous distributed E/E architecture of a single function or a "box". In fact, it is the fusion of software from multiple controllers into one controller, such as for a pure electric vehicle, The power domain includes controllers such as BMS, MCU, VCU, DCDC, etc. All the functions of these controllers are placed in one controller and entrusted to one party. This not only saves money on hardware costs for other controllers, but also shifts from connecting multiple parties to connecting one party, making it a pleasure to think about it.

Domain controllers can greatly reduce the number of controllers and vehicle wiring, and technologies such as multi-core heterogeneous chips and Hypervisor provide support for the development and application of domain controllers from both software and hardware aspects. At present, BOSCH and other suppliers have corresponding domain controller products, but it still takes a long time to achieve a truly centralized E/E architecture in the domain. After all, this cannot be achieved alone, and it requires strong cooperation and promotion from OEMs, suppliers, and others to achieve it. For example, software in the same domain controller may be provided by multiple suppliers, each of which is responsible for not only upgrading their own software, but also integrating and testing complex and different types of software. Therefore, making integration and upgrading work relatively easy is a problem. For example, developing domain controllers for different domains through collaboration between different suppliers and OEMs can bring many new problems.

The ultimate goal of a domain controller is computer architecture, which is composed of heterogeneous multi-core processors, bringing together the functionality of the entire vehicle.

2、 Introduce service-oriented (SOA) communication based on signal communication and integrate the advantages of both

A signal based communication method, where the sender of the information is not responsible for who receives the signal but only for sending it out, and the receiver is not responsible for who sends the signal but only for receiving what they want. Signal based communication can transmit certain information from a node to other nodes that require this information through the bus. The information mainly includes some physical state values and control values, such as sender speed, vehicle speed, etc. The signal can be triggered in cycles, events, or hybrid ways.

Signal based communication is currently widely used in vehicle buses, such as information transmission between controllers through CAN bus. We focus on the frames on the communication matrix, the signals contained in the frames, cycles, and interactive nodes.

SOA is a software architecture, as well as a software design method and concept, with decades of application experience in the IT field. SOA has the characteristics of "loose coupling", "accessible interface standards", and "easy scalability", allowing developers to respond to iterative and ever-changing customer needs with small software changes. So far, there is no recognized definition of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and many organizations have described SOA from different perspectives, with the following three typical ones:

(1) W3C definition: SOA is an application architecture in which all functions are defined as independent services with well-defined callable interfaces that can be called in a defined order to form business processes.

(2) Definition of Service architecture. com: A service is a function that is precisely defined, well encapsulated, and independent of the environment and state of other services. SOA is essentially a collection of services that communicate with each other. This communication may be simple data transfer, or it may involve two or more services coordinating certain activities. Services require certain methods to connect.

(3) Gartner's definition: SOA is a software design method based on a C/S architecture, with applications composed of services and service consumers. Unlike most common C/S architecture models, SOA emphasizes loose coupling of components and uses independent standard interfaces.