Intelligent Vehicle Computing Platform and System Architecture Research Report Released

Zoss Automotive Research Institute released the "2019-2020 Intelligent Vehicle Computing Platform and System Architecture Research Report". 

With the development of the new four modernizations of automobiles, the traditional distributed E/E architecture is challenged: the three-electric system of EV increases the complexity of the automobile E/E architecture; functions such as smart cockpits and autonomous driving require the integration of more sensor data, which poses more challenges to OTA, computing power and vehicle safety. Therefore, future cars will require ECU collaboration with higher computing power and scalable architecture design. The replacement effect of domain-centralized electronic and electrical architecture and vehicle-centralized electronic and electrical architecture on the existing distributed architecture will gradually emerge, and car companies and Tier1 will compete for forward-looking layout. Nishikawa, general manager of Toyota's electronic and electrical architecture development department, summarized the evolution route of electronic and electrical architecture as: simple LAN → layered LAN → central gateway + domain LAN → computing platform (including online cloud) → computing platform ++ (including online cloud and offline cloud).

Source: Toyota

Bosch divides the evolution path of automotive electronic and electrical architecture into six stages: from simple to complex, they are modularization, integration, centralization, domain fusion, on-board computers and vehicle-to-cloud computing.

Source: Bosch, Zoss Research

In terms of E/E architecture, Tesla is the most advanced. Its new generation of centralized E/E architecture has reached the stage of on-board central computers and regional controllers. With the self-developed operating system, it can realize whole-vehicle OTA. Compared with traditional car companies, Tesla is more than five years ahead. Recently, due to functional defects in the automatic parking system, Hyundai decided to recall more than 12,000 2020 Sonata models. This is the most depressing part for traditional car companies. Adding more and more intelligent and networked functions to the traditional architecture will only lead to more customer dissatisfaction and even recalls due to the complexity of the software. Only by realizing whole-vehicle OTA under the new E/E architecture can the recall problem be finally solved. Therefore, automakers such as Volkswagen, Audi, GM, and Toyota are accelerating the deployment of a new E/E architecture, and mass production will probably be in 2021-2025. Volkswagen ID.3 will be equipped with an E/E architecture called E³, and a cross-domain central controller will appear to achieve a domain fusion architecture; GM's new generation E/E architecture Global B will be installed on the new Cadillac CT5; Toyota will adopt the Central & Zone E/E architecture. Domestic automakers such as BYD, Hozon Auto, and Singularity are all using the new generation of E/E architecture. Taking Tesla's latest electronic and electrical architecture as an example, the E/E architecture of its Model 3 model includes three major parts:

• The first is the autonomous driving and entertainment control module, which takes over all assisted driving-related sensors, such as cameras, millimeter-wave radars, etc.

• The second is the right body controller BCM RH, which integrates automatic entry and exit, thermal management, torque control, etc., as well as ultrasonic radar for parking.

• The third is the left body controller BCM LH, which is responsible for the interior lighting and entry section.

Toyota will adopt the Central & Zone E/E solution in its future electrical and electronic architecture.

Toyota Central & Zone Architecture

Source: Toyota, Zos

From the perspective of Tier 1, Aptiv, Huawei, Continental, Bosch and other Tier 1 are stepping up the deployment of the next generation of electronic and electrical architecture :

• Aptiv officially released its new smart vehicle architecture SVA in January 2020, and plans to realize the semi-intelligent vehicle architecture (PARTIAL SVA) in 2022 and the full smart vehicle architecture (FULL SVA) in 2025.

• Huawei proposed a CC architecture based on computing and communication, which consists of a distributed network and three domain controllers.

• Continental, Bosch and others have also proposed future E/E architecture plans and are actively promoting them.

Taking Aptiv SVA electronic and electrical architecture as an example, it consists of three parts:

• Power Data Center (PDC): a “universal docking station” and zone consolidator;

• Unified power and data backbone: Simplified wiring harness technology/design that is modular and automatable; redundant network through dual-ring topology;

• Central computing cluster: a general-purpose computing platform with standardized interfaces and an Internet security gateway.

Figure: Schematic diagram of Aptiv's SVA smart vehicle architecture

Source: Aptiv

In general, the domain-centralized E/E architecture will be the mainstream in the next few years, and its core technologies mainly include gateways, domain controllers, and automotive Ethernet. The domain controller can divide the functions of various parts of automotive electronics into several areas, such as the powertrain domain, body electronics domain, and assisted driving domain, and then use the multi-core CPU/GPU chips with powerful processing capabilities to relatively centrally control most of the functions that originally belonged to each ECU in the domain, thereby replacing the traditional distributed architecture. At present, Tier1's layout of domain controllers is mainly concentrated in the smart cockpit domain and autonomous driving domain. 

The emergence of automotive Ethernet is to meet the high bandwidth requirements of emerging technologies such as ADAS systems, high-definition in-vehicle entertainment systems, Internet of Vehicles systems, cloud services and big data in vehicle applications, so as to partially or even completely replace traditional in-vehicle networks such as CAN, LIN, FlexRay, and LVDS. The main suppliers of automotive Ethernet are NXP, Rosenberger, Broadcom, Marvell, Toshiba, TE Connectivity, etc. As the data exchange hub of the whole vehicle network, the automotive gateway can route network data such as CAN, LIN, MOST, FlexRay, etc. in different networks. Tier 1 that deploys gateways is mainly composed of foreign semiconductor manufacturers and traditional automotive suppliers, such as NXP, Infineon, Renesas Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Continental, Bosch, Texas Instruments, Intel, etc.; domestic companies that deploy include Jingwei Hirain, Zhiyuan Electronics, and United Automotive Electronics. 

In their analysis of E/E architecture trends, Bosch and Toyota attributed the car + cloud computing architecture to the highest stage. At present, cockpit applications that do not require high latency (such as listening to music, voice recognition, etc.) have already achieved a combination of cloud computing + local computing. The autonomous driving domain will also follow this trend, but it will be more complicated, and will be a combination of vehicle-side computing + cloud computing + edge computing. The combination of vehicle-side computing + cloud computing + edge computing requires the support of vehicle-road collaboration technology and smart road infrastructure. Vehicle-road collaboration will be implemented first in China, and Huawei's CC (computing + communication) architecture may be a new generation of E/E architecture that is more suitable for vehicle-road collaboration applications.