A brief discussion on the technical difficulties currently faced by decoupling autonomous driving software and hardware

2. Middleware factories, main engine manufacturers and suppliers form a middleware alliance, with the chip factory or main engine factory taking the lead to unify the rules. In testing the boundaries of the market, a very powerful OEM or chip factory will take the lead to form a unified standard for the industry alliance and unify the OS, interfaces, etc. to form industry standards.

3. Completely open source, the chip company creates a proprietary OS, allowing upstream and downstream companies to develop on this basis. Chip manufacturers create open source toolkits like NVIDIA's CUDA, which not only develop their own OS and middleware, but are also completely open source, helping upstream and downstream customers to use tools together for better adaptation development and establish a good ecosystem.

4. As a service, we provide door-to-door middleware customized services and maintenance work for suppliers. Due to the low market ceiling and the difficulty in unifying middleware, middleware may not become an independent product, but a customized service. Because middleware manufacturers have better middleware research experience, they are better positioned to provide such customized services.

In the past, various mobile phone brands were in full bloom. From 2005 to 2010, when "brick phones" and smart phones were flying side by side, there were up to more than 200 mobile phone interfaces in circulation on the market. Different brands of mobile phones have different charging interfaces, different headphone interfaces, various large and small interfaces with the same shape and different sizes, and even mobile phones of the same brand have different charging interfaces.

A digital expert at that time often had to bring 5 or 6 types of chargers and 5 or 6 different cables when he went on a business trip. Even if we later have a universal charger, we can only pull out the battery of the tablet phone to charge. The problem of the inconsistency between the charging port of the smartphone and the headphone jacks of different sizes still cannot be solved.

Such a chaotic and disorderly period was the most brilliant and vigorous development of mobile phone technology after the rise of mobile phones, just like the current development of smart cars. Today, we see that mobile phone interfaces have been basically unified. Hundreds of mobile phone manufacturers have gradually reduced their numbers in the process of self-research and finally formed standards under the final decision of the market.

The smart car industry is deeply affected by the consumer electronics market, especially the mobile phone market. In the past two years, everyone in the industry has appeared to be very impetuous. Everyone is eager to quickly progress to an end state, hoping to be able to do so in a very short time. time to select a master. However, the automobile manufacturing industry is actually a slow-growing industry. From the production of vehicles to mass production and then to the consumer market, only by collecting feedback from tens of millions of users can we continuously optimize ourselves and form standards. And perhaps only at this time can middleware truly be unified to form a standard.

When the technology matures in the future, middleware may be used as the basic software solidified on the ASIC chip, and it is unknown whether it will no longer appear in the form of middleware alone.

Two final words

However, having said that, at present, when all parties are facing difficulties, who is suitable for middleware?

Overall, if we are aiming to use standard middleware to completely realize the decoupling of software and hardware, the most suitable middleware is actually the chip manufacturer.

Two reasons: First, algorithm adaptation is ultimately based on the chip platform, and the chip is the cornerstone. Second, there are fewer chip companies than algorithm companies, and it is relatively less difficult to unify them.

But for now, based on the premise that everyone expects customization, algorithm companies are most suitable for customized middleware.

"Chip companies pay more attention to the application of the chip itself, such as whether to add a verification mechanism, how to schedule and accelerate BSP, etc. Chip companies can implement these requirements, but chip companies cannot make better optimization suggestions for application software and middleware. Users The client can only use its mature solution, but this solution may not meet all the needs of the software.”

It can be seen that algorithm companies are the ones that receive the most customization requests in business practice and are asked to do middleware adaptation the most. It is most convenient to directly make customized middleware that adapts to their own algorithms.

The chief engineer of a certain OEM also has the same view:

“For now, the upper-layer functional services are relatively focused. Autonomous driving solution providers have a deep understanding of functional applications and abstract middleware from the application layer, which can better match the underlying mainstream chip hardware solution providers. The overall solution is more reasonable. "