The blueprint for the development of automotive electronics: changes in the architecture of automotive super ECUs

When reviewing the development of automotive electronics, I saw a EU-sponsored project on the development of high-computing power computing platforms. The name of this project is "European Processor Initiative". It is a research project in Europe to develop high-computing power computing platforms for the future of AI and 5G society.

In this research project, BMW's forward-looking research engineers opened their minds and talked about the blueprint for the development of automotive electronics in 2025 and 2030 from the perspective of domain control that we already know. As shown below:

Processing units of automotive ECUs from past to future

The development of automotive computing platforms is a demand for hardware and software integration to a certain extent. The core driving force is that with the development of the entire chip industry , the hardware resources in automotive electronics are also growing, and the computing power and storage capacity of MCUs are constantly improving. The next generation of automotive computing platforms will integrate functions on a larger scale and will be a super ECU that integrates various heterogeneous performance processors. Multi-processor systems mean that different types of interconnected processor technologies and hardware accelerators are integrated together. Different functions that originally belonged to different domains are integrated into physically isolated microprocessors.

Automotive eHPC Platform, 1st reference implementation

The following paragraph is more important. Various factors need to be considered when building the architecture:

Architectural Concept and Hardware Components 

SIP modules are housing performance cores, random access memory (RAM), read only memory (ROM or flash) and needed power management integrated circuits (PMIC). Dedicated safety or realtime-microcontrollers could integrated on SIP modules. 

We are evaluating GigabitEthernet to interconnect every computational unit within the system. For diagnostic access, we use a Gigabit-Ethernet, as well. The car internal field busses (CAN, LIN or BroadR-Reach Ethernet (100BaseT1)) were adopted from previous E/E architectures to be backwards compatible. 

We create a two out-of-three (2oo3) redundancy pattern to detect wrong decisions and tolerate one faulty component. To avoid common cause failures, we use diverse hardware for each performance cluster.

After reading this explanation, let’s take a look at the ADAS domain controller currently made by BMW. It seems to be made for the future computing platform.

Summary: Automotive electronics has developed very fast in the past, but according to the current situation, the resources of a parts industry will not be able to support its development in the future. From a certain perspective, the protection boundary of the industry has begun to be broken, and leading car companies have begun to open up many technical boundaries, and they also need to make room for R&D resources. It is time for us to reserve some cross-generational knowledge systems^_^, but it is painful to learn.