Automotive Engineering - May 2021 - 18

Software transforms
vehicle development
There's a pretty high likelihood that the hardware in a car at the start
of production will not be the same as in vehicles later in production.
" Product life cycles in the cockpit are different than those in
powertrains, " said Matt Cole, senior VP, product development, at
Visteon. " In cockpits, there are more functions that need over-the-air
updating. By 2025, 35% of our domain controllers will have OTA. "
OTA implementations are expanding rapidly. On the commercialvehicle side, Volvo Trucks recently expanded its remote programming
service to include what it calls " unlimited parameter updates. " Smaller
vehicles are also moving updates into the mainstream. Ford's electric
Mustang Mach-E and its new F-150 pickup both offer OTA, with the
company claiming it can extend vehicle lifetimes while improving
features. GM plans to provide OTA updating on most vehicles by 2023.
Market analyst Technavio predicts OTA-equipped vehicle shipments
will exceed 90 million during the next three years.
AI will come into play from both sides of the OTA platform. When deeplearning tools learn while vehicles are being driven, systems will generally

report back to OEMs. Programmers in labs will also use AI
tools in the development of software that will be
downloaded to vehicles over their lifetimes. That's going to
push computing requirements far higher. Many systems will
address these requirements with a combination of CPUs,
graphical processing units and neural network processors.
" There absolutely has to be some ability to learn,
there has to be some kind of AI, " Visteon's Cole said.
" CPUs will need at least 100 GFLOPs, neural processors will need five to 10, tops. "

Run faster
Creating scalable designs for the hardware that runs
these programs will be a big factor in the rollout of

When myriad sensors and powerful processors are sharing data that must be transmitted and analyzed in milliseconds, networks
are a critical part of the architecture. Ethernet
is now a critical vehicle networking technology, though legacy CAN and other architectures continue to play important roles.
Ethernet is fairly new in vehicle communications, but its high performance and low
cost make it attractive for carmakers.
Researchers at MarketsandMarkets expect
Ethernet to grow at 20%, rising from $1.8
billion last year to $5.6 billion by 2026.
Some vehicle electronic systems are increasingly resembling personal computer
architectures. PCI Express (PCIe), a local serial
communications standard common in PCs,
augments Ethernet in some vehicle systems.
" When we then talk about the data in the
central computer, we see the zones connected over Ethernet links to an aggregation
switch, " said Daniel Weyl, VP automotive
software, at NXP. " As the aggregated
bandwidth is easily exceeding the available
Ethernet uplink speeds, more and more
switches are offering a PCIe network interface card uplink. "
Many vehicles will employ zones, in
which different subsystems share data with
other zones and central computers. Zones
and domains will typically communicate
with everything in their segment using a
range of legacy interfaces including CAN,

18 May 2021

Ethernet and PCIe will let systems communicate
at high data rates.
LIN and FlexRay.
Ethernet links will connect zones with
powerful central controllers as well as with
other zones. This data sharing, combined

with the huge volumes of data needed to
provide higher levels of autonomy, shifts the
spotlight to wiring harnesses. Ethernet helps
reduce the bulk of wiring harnesses.
" To achieve a reduction in the cabling
complexity, we must consider the whole vehicle electronic/electrical architecture and
the introduction of zone controllers for the
connection of sensors and actuators, " said
Tamara Snow, head of research and advanced
engineering, Continental North America.
" Software-defined functions require repartitioning of functionalities and dynamic
allocation of resources. This results in a
significant reduction of wire harnesses. "
All the available communications options
give automakers many paths to connect
sensors, actuators and controllers. Getting
data to the central controller so sensor inputs
can be fused and analyzed requires
significant changes in both hardware and
software. OEMs have differing strategies.
" There are a lot of different approaches
from the various OEMs on how to go to zonal
architectures, but they all intend to use
Ethernet as the main backbone technology
to move the data from the zones to the
center, " NXP's Weyl said. " Therefore, you
need high-speed communication via PCIe or
Ethernet. But from the software side, you
also need to have middleware abstracting
this interaction with ease of use. "
Terry Costlow

AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING

NXP

Communications provide foundation for autonomy

Automotive Engineering - May 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Automotive Engineering - May 2021