Visteon's progressive innovation and outlook for next-generation smart cars

This material is compiled from the speech materials of Markus Schupfner, CTO and Senior Vice President of Visteon in  November 2019.

Visteon's product portfolio includes: instrument panels, head-up displays , cockpit computers ( controllers ), infotainment systems, display systems, networking systems, autonomous driving systems, etc. According to third-party research, Visteon is currently one of the top five Tier 1 suppliers of smart connected cars, ranking first in digital instruments and second in central control displays.  

The development history of cockpit electronics is as follows: 2008 Proprietary embedded infotainment system → 2011 Fully digital instrument → 2015 Apple CarPlay and Android Auto → 2018 Cockpit domain controller → 2020 Localized Android infotainment system → 2021 Multi-display module + ADAS L2 + HMI → 2022 Adaptive cockpit.
 
The development history of cockpit safety is as follows: 2009 Automatic emergency braking → 2014 Lane keeping assist → 2017 Single lane highway assist → 2018 Highway driving assist and lane change → 2020 E-NCAP+REM+VRUs → 2021 WP29 standard for L2 Hands-Off → 2022 UN standard for L2 Hands-Off.

The main development trends of cockpit electronics:

• Digitalization of instruments for electric vehicles and safety drives

• CarPlay and Android Auto win the infotainment war

•From distributed ECU to centralized cockpit domain controller

•Multi-display digital cockpit with ADASHMI

• Adaptive cockpit integrates in-vehicle monitoring and ADAS environment
 
. The main development trends of cockpit safety are:

•More focus on improving L2 ADAS (referring to L2+)

• Sensor fusion and increased computing power are required

• Only in the US and Japan is L2 hands-free driving allowed

• The United Nations WP29 working group is developing new specifications

• It is expected that the UN regulations on hands-free driving in 2022 will increase the demand for ADAS/AD controllers.
 
The basic requirements for cockpit domain controllers are: multiple displays, centralized computing, scalability, and multi-core. The basic requirements for autonomous driving domain controllers are: centralized sensor fusion, scalable GPU capabilities, abstraction and security, and openness.

Visteon has launched cockpit domain controllers and autonomous driving domain controllers. The cockpit domain controller is called SmartCore, which is a secure centralized computing platform serving multiple displays and multiple applications, making the cockpit more cost-effective, providing scalability from entry-level to advanced functions, and providing middleware and tools for rapid integration.
 
Visteon's autonomous driving domain controller is called Drivercore, with three modules: Compute, Runtime and Studio. Compute has computing power from 2 TFLOPS to 20 TFLOPS, and provides a modular design for failure safety and information security; Runtime provides secure communication and is easy to integrate into the vehicle; Studio provides an open R&D ecosystem.
 

The transformation of EE architecture is changing the layout of the entire vehicle. Why is a new EE architecture needed? Mainly due to the challenges of industry development and the advancement of new automotive technologies. In particular, automotive Ethernet TSN has changed the future EE architecture.
 
The challenges of industry development are:

• Significant increase in the number of ECUs (over 100)

• Requires more sensors/actuators/computing power

• Hardware/software separation: integration of ecosystem development partners

• Increased weight and production costs of vehicle wiring harnesses (up to 5 km, >50 kg, production time >1000 hours)

• Fail-safe, fault-tolerant operation, information security

• Seamless connection and upgrade on cloud/edge side
 

The development of new automotive technologies includes:

• Ethernet Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Applications connect to virtual domains/regions

• Parallel computing load to ensure fail-safe, fault-tolerant and fail-operable

• Microservices

•Permanent system/software/data upgradeability

Currently, the network facilities inside the car are mainly based on domain-based architecture. There are different domains for each key function: one domain for body control, one domain for infotainment, one domain for telematics, one domain for powertrain, and so on. Typically, different domains use a combination of different network protocols (such as CAN, LIN, FlexRay and other protocols).
 
As the complexity of the network continues to increase, this method of using different protocols for different domains is becoming less and less efficient. Therefore, in the next few years, it will be necessary to shift from the current domain-based architecture to a regional (Zonal) architecture.
 
Visteon expects that the characteristics of the automotive regional architecture after 2024 will be:

• Ethernet TSN backbone with high bandwidth and true real-time communication capabilities

• All sensors and actuators are processed by scalable regional gateway ECUs

• Regional system architecture will integrate new vehicle functions, technologies and weight cost advantages.
 
The regional system architecture characteristics after 2028 are:

• Further consolidation of processing units into a “super” computing device, including redundancy

• Processor blades provide scalable computing power

• Reuse of the automotive Ethernet TSN backbone architecture
 
provides good scalability of the regional architecture, including a variety of expansion options from entry-level to luxury models.

The regional architecture includes two core devices: the regional gateway ECU and the Super Core (central computing platform).
 
The regional gateway ECU provides and distributes data and power to support the functions of specific areas of the vehicle; supports interfaces such as sensors and actuators; replaces other network protocols such as CAN FD, Flexray, etc. with 10BaseT1 Ethernet; acts as a gateway, switch, and smart junction box.
 
The Super Core (central computing platform) acts as an in-vehicle application server and is a control unit with multi-GiG interfaces and multiple SoCs. The Super Core supports a service-oriented architecture (SoA) and is a fully scalable and upgradeable platform that can be connected to edge servers and cloud servers.

The above figure is a typical regional architecture example. In an L2+ vehicle, 139 ECUs are distributed to 11 regions, connected to 8 regional ECUs + 3 Super Cores. The regional ECUs at the edge of the vehicle are designed to minimize the function implementation path, and the three SuperCore ECUs are set in the middle of the vehicle.
 

The advantages of this case include:

1. Savings in wiring harnesses through 6 to 11 regional ECUs;

2. The regional system architecture can save more than 50% of the wiring harness length, saving both control/data wiring harnesses and power wiring harnesses, and reducing the production time of wiring harnesses;

3. Standardized regional ECU deployment can be adjusted through changes, appropriate increase or decrease to achieve flexible deployment, and can also distribute power and provide protection.

The development trend of electronic and electrical architecture is briefly summarized in the following table:

Looking ahead, an L3 autonomous driving system will probably require a 20,000 GFLOPS GPU, a 1,000kDMIPS CPU, and 200W of power consumption.