ZONAL Regional Architecture: Achieving the Dream of Future Cars

The automotive world is about to embark on a revolution so profound that not only will electric propulsion be used to replace different power units, but the production of cars and other vehicles will be fundamentally changed from then on; this change is no less important than the introduction of the moving assembly line by Ford in 1913.

Innovation has brought great progress to the automotive industry. Automakers are constantly developing new technologies for vehicles, whether to improve safety, provide better performance or enhance passenger comfort. Some of these innovations come from research developed specifically for the automotive industry, while others are borrowed from motorsports and even aviation. Looking ahead, advances from other professional fields will also play an important role. In a recent survey sponsored by Molex and Mouser Electronics, Dimensional Research surveyed more than 500 automotive industry professionals. About 43% of respondents said that technological leaps from other fields are the key driving force behind changes in automotive design. As a result, future cars will have a rich array of features and become more complex than ever before.

Despite the plethora of new technologies being adopted by automobiles, the way cars are manufactured has barely changed significantly in decades. Electronic systems within modern cars typically account for more than half of the vehicle’s value, and new features are constantly being added; but the technology used to connect electronic components has lagged behind the development of software and hardware. In fact, in a survey jointly sponsored by Molex and Mouser Electronics, more than 57% of the professionals surveyed believed that technical issues in manufacturing are one of the biggest obstacles to achieving the next generation of automotive architectures and must be overcome.

The evolution of automobile manufacturing

The evolution of how cars are made has created obstacles to production technology. For example, new features and systems are now developed and added to the existing car wiring system. Each function is added as a new module, called an electronic control unit (ECU), each with its own dedicated wiring to connect to the rest of the vehicle. The latest vehicles require 100 to 150 ECUs each, as well as the wiring harnesses that go with them. However, there is no longer enough space inside today's vehicles to accommodate all of these systems, and manufacturers are also facing saturation issues when it comes to wiring.

After years of development, the number of complex parts that need to be installed in cars has gradually increased, resulting in increasingly complex cable harnesses. The problem has snowballed, and the car's cable harness has become one of the most complex parts in the manufacturing process.

Modern automotive cable harnesses are responsible for transmitting power, data and control signals throughout the vehicle, but their complex routing drives up manufacturing costs. Although cars are manufactured in a highly automated production process, cable harnesses are one of the few manual assembly systems in any vehicle, which has several important implications for manufacturers.

Any part that needs to be assembled by hand is expensive to produce, and the size and complexity of automotive wiring harnesses make them more expensive than most parts, which also has a great impact on quality. One of the main benefits of using robots to produce cars is quality control, because robots can repeat operations with near-perfect accuracy. However, due to the complexity and flexibility of automotive wiring harnesses, current robots cannot be used to manufacture cable harnesses. For example, the lack of rigidity of the harness can be bent, twisted, or otherwise twisted freely, making it difficult to assemble using robots.

With kilometers of wires connected to hundreds of connectors in every vehicle, the manual assembly of automotive wiring harness systems is a common cause of failures and warranty claims throughout the automotive industry. These claims are costly both in terms of material costs and reputation, and should not be taken lightly by automakers.

Copper Cabling

Today, the industry is encouraging the use of smaller and more efficient transmission methods, but copper cables still play a key role in vehicle performance. However, such large amounts of copper cables are bulky and consume the car's range and performance.

As the automotive industry continues to introduce new technologies, we will see a greater demand for electrical connectivity in the next generation of cars. As manufacturers are keen to use the latest 5G wireless communication technology to improve safety and user experience, cars will become part of a dynamic network for the first time, sharing information with other road users and even traffic control infrastructure, which is expected to improve the safety and efficiency of road traffic. This technology is called vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication technology, and we will see cars equipped with more sensors, controllers and computing power than ever before.

81% of respondents believe Level 4 autonomous driving will be a standard feature in new cars within the next 10 years – which will put more pressure on vehicle wiring and performance

This technology is becoming increasingly important in the much-hyped move toward autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles. 81% of professionals surveyed by Molex/Mouser believe that Level 4 autonomous driving will be a standard feature in new cars within the next 10 years, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are already beginning to provide users with a complete road safety solution. The key to interacting with other road users will depend on the system’s ability to collect, analyze, and process information about the surrounding environment with the lowest possible latency.

These innovations are happening at the same time as the shift to alternative energy sources. Hybrid cars are now quite popular, and many manufacturers have promised to eventually stop producing cars with internal combustion engines. Batteries and even hydrogen fuel cells are seen as sustainable solutions for the future. The wiring harness systems of the next generation of cars must be upgraded again to handle the power and high-speed communication needs. Automakers are using this as an opportunity to try to solve basic problems in vehicle design and manufacturing.

Flat Architecture and Domain Architecture

The largest automakers have decades of experience in design and production, and the architecture of vehicles has accumulated changes and evolved over the years as new systems have been added. Connections from component devices to ECUs to vehicles are added in a haphazard manner, so there is a lot of duplication of wiring and complex structures, resulting in a "flat" wiring architecture. This is a highly complex structure consisting of a large number of cables, which makes vehicle assembly inefficient and labor-intensive.

This flat architecture cannot adapt to the new systems required by the future automotive industry, so many manufacturers are turning to a more structured architecture, often called domain-oriented design. In this architecture, the vehicle architecture is grouped by function to control the entire vehicle. Whether it is the powertrain, safety system or in-vehicle entertainment system, each functional domain has its own controller and communicates with other functional domains via gateways to create a unified vehicle system.

However, domain architectures that group functions by functionality do not solve the problem of too many cables. A functional domain still consists of individual devices deployed throughout the car, so each device needs to connect to a controller. Although more adaptable than traditional flat architectures, domain architectures are still far from the ideal solution for the future. Nevertheless, domain architectures are a stepping stone to a completely new approach to automotive electronics that not only changes how cars operate, but also how they are built, updated, and maintained.

The evolution of vehicle architecture

Import Zonal regional architecture design

Zonal architecture is the name of a new automotive electronic technology. Compared with the domain architecture that groups functions by function, the Zonal architecture is a more efficient solution. The functions of the car are divided into several zones according to their location. Each zone is responsible for the devices installed in the zone, and the external connection of the zone must be carried out through the zone controller or gateway of the zone. Since the Zonal gateway is close to the device it controls, the cables connecting to each device are relatively short.

Each Zonal regional gateway is connected to the central computing cluster at the heart of the vehicle. A key change is that the communication between the Zonal regional gateway and the central computing unit is similar to a computer network, rather than the cable harness in the car in the past. Therefore, the communication between the zones can be carried out through a small high-speed network cable, which greatly reduces the number and size of cables installed in the vehicle.

This new approach takes advantage of the latest developments in computing power and high-speed communications, both of which are essential as the next generation of cars must process an exponentially larger amount of data. The eyes and ears of the latest ADAS and autonomous systems are sensor arrays that will generate unprecedented amounts of information that must be processed at high rates. Future in-vehicle network speeds will reach 10 Gbps per second or more. A car equipped with the Zonal architecture will require computing performance equivalent to several of the most efficient desktop workstations, constituting a "data center on wheels."