What is the car ZCU that we talk about every day?

It is worth mentioning that the new AURIX TC4x series MCU supports high-speed communication interfaces such as 5 Gbit Ethernet and PCIe, as well as new communication interfaces such as CAN-XL and 10BASE T1S Ethernet. The improvement in network throughput and connectivity provides customers with the performance and flexibility required to implement new E/E architectures.

On September 20, 2022, NVIDIA released a new smart car chip Thor, whose AI computing power is close to 2000TFLOPS, aiming to replace multiple individual chips in the car and reduce production costs. However, it is not so easy to put everything that needs to be calculated in one ZCU. Therefore, the current automotive E/E architecture itself is in a state of gradual absorption and merger, and ZCU will also be a slow integration process:

In the first stage, ZCU may adopt a universal design, compatible with existing ECU networks (such as CAN/LIN/FlexRay), as a data forwarding device, abstracting the functions within the zone through the service layer; in the second stage, ZCU will reduce the number of ECUs in the zone, integrate more ECU functions, and realize virtualization of control I/O; in the third stage, as the demand for computing power of ZCU increases, MCU may not be able to meet the demand, and it may be necessary to introduce a more powerful MPU to provide computing power.

In short, the development process of ZCU may be the same as that of the CPU, south bridge and north bridge in the past, gradually absorbing, and finally the last U will handle the calculations of the entire PC.