Electronic and electrical architecture will lead the technological transformation of smart cars

This year, GM has mentioned on various occasions more than once that "the new generation of electronic and electrical architecture Global B will provide system support for electrification, active safety, in-car entertainment, smart connectivity and Super Cruise technology upgrades in future automotive product development, and lay the foundation for GM to launch true 'smart cars'." Cadillac CT5 is GM's first model equipped with this architecture for the Chinese market. What kind of disruptive changes will the electronic and electrical architecture, which is currently valued by mainstream global automakers, bring to automobiles?

The electrical/electronic architecture (EEA ) is a set of integration methods defined by car companies. This architecture can perfectly integrate various sensors , ECUs (electronic control units), wiring harness topologies, and electronic/electrical distribution systems in the car, complete the distribution of computing, power, and energy, and realize various intelligent functions of the vehicle.

European automakers such as Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo have begun developing automotive electronic and electrical architectures based on new in-vehicle high-performance computing platforms (HPC). On the one hand, this is because their competitor Tesla has adopted a leapfrog development approach in many aspects; on the other hand, they are keenly aware that consumers' expectations for future smart cars are similar to those for smartphones. Traditional automakers have already felt the pressure that the development of new technologies has brought to their own development processes, especially when facing Internet giants that "beat the slow with the fast" and focus on experience and iteration. This competitive pressure is even greater.

In the future, the functionality and quality of software will determine the product experience of cars, and the differentiation of cars will gradually be "defined by software", which is also a common feature of smart homes, smart phones and other products. All ambitious car companies hope to firmly control the core technology that determines the personalization of products, so each car company will build car products based on an intelligent and evolvable electronic and electrical architecture.

The automotive electronic and electrical architecture is evolving towards meeting the needs of users' personal digital life, and its core logic is based on the concept of "MaaS" (Mobility as a Service). So, how has the automotive electronic and electrical architecture evolved from the past to the present and into the future?

The traditional electronic and electrical architecture is a distributed solution, which is divided into different modules according to the functions of the car, such as powertrain, infotainment, chassis and body. In this way, the functions can be simplified and it is convenient to find the best supplier in each module. In addition, the design of each controller is based on specific functional requirements, and the information between each other is transmitted through the CAN bus to realize the functions of the whole vehicle.

The biggest feature of this distributed solution is that the functions are clearly divided, the boundaries can be strictly defined through pre-design, and all historical work has strong inheritance. Since each module is relatively independent after division, if changes need to be made, just select some things to update. However, the disadvantage of this model is also obvious, that is, it is easy to lead to too many modules and poor controllability.

Nowadays, the automotive electronic and electrical architecture has developed towards centralization, and uses the "domain" division method to integrate subordinate related parts as much as possible, breaking the functional division within the module into several large units. In particular, through the integration of the system and software levels, the original hardware configuration limitations are broken, and the domain controller becomes the main computing and scheduling unit in a domain, which can meet the computing needs of the entire domain.

The shortcoming of the "domain" solution is mainly that different vehicle platforms have physical restrictions on the spatial layout of modules. The division based on a field may not be the optimal allocation in the physical space of the vehicle. If you want to promote its use on a large scale, you will inevitably be constrained by the vehicle model. The future development direction of automotive electronic and electrical architecture is to build around computing platforms in a larger area. Car companies can use one or several core computing platforms as the basis and build a complete set of software systems on top of them. For ease of understanding, we can think of this approach as a mobile phone motherboard.

It can be seen that the evolution of automotive electronic and electrical architecture is mainly centered around a powerful communication architecture and a vehicle-level computing platform. From the perspective of the computing platform, the first step for vehicle companies to update their architecture is to re-examine what should be put together, what needs to be distributed independently, and what needs to be frequently upgraded.

In addition, different car companies also have differences in the functional allocation between the vehicle basic computing platform and the information and communication platform. For example, some car companies put these two parts together directly to integrate them into a complete HPC. In addition, the backbone network composed of Ethernet will become the data channel between the computing platform and traditional modules. Massive data communication needs to rely on a highly stable and large-bandwidth network architecture to meet the latency requirements of the control system.

Under the evolution trend of automotive electronic and electrical architecture, if the transformation of automakers goes smoothly, the future automotive industry will see the same phenomenon as the mobile phone industry, such as more automakers releasing operating systems and holding software developer conferences. "Software-defined cars" means that the vehicle development model will become simpler. Automakers will invest a large number of talents in software development, and will no longer insist on the "V model" and a very certain organizational form to carry out vehicle development.