How to simplify smart car electronic control units

Behind any function, there must be hardware support. Just like a digital camera, it is not enough to have a lens. It also needs a piece or chip in the body. Moreover, in the digital age, the level of this chip is directly related to Determines the grade of the camera. In cars, many more chips are needed than in cameras. They are called electronic control units, that is (). Many people think it refers specifically to the engine program, but in fact, the entire car's electronic system is composed of many components, which are used to control various functions of the car, such as lights, entertainment systems, anti-theft systems, etc.
As cars become more and more electronic, especially with the increase in automatic driving, active safety and other functions, the number of cars will increase rapidly. Some predictions say that in the next five years, the average number of people in the car will reach , and now the number of some cars with complex electronic structures has already exceeded one hundred. However, this article is not about how much more can be achieved, but how to simplify it.
From one-to-one to one-to-many
To discuss this topic, let’s take the most popular autonomous driving as an example. In an autonomous vehicle, it may include different sensors such as lidar, millimeter wave radar, mid-range radar, front camera, rear camera, etc. The usual approach is that each sensor is processed by a chip. The amount of data and calculation required to support autonomous driving is huge, and these chips must be deployed on a bus network (the Ethernet used by Tesla is too advanced compared to them). The problem is that : The network itself is slow.
The network is inherently slow, and because these chips are dispersedly arranged, data exchange cannot be made fast. The more chips there are, the lower the efficiency. How can we use autonomous driving like this? Turning one-to-one into one-to-many has become a solution. Centralize these chips together and use a smaller number of chipsets or a chip with super computing power as the nerve center to cooperate with those sensors. , in terms of automotive electronic network deployment, this means simplification.
If you follow the traditional automotive electronics architecture, if you want to add more functions, you have to add more devices, and if you want to strengthen the computing power, you have to add more methods. However, as the capacity requirements for data transmission increase, As it gets bigger, relying on increased numbers won’t work. People who have experience in decoration should understand the advantages and disadvantages of nature and nurture. Just like water and electricity renovation, if you lay a good foundation in the early stage, subsequent upgrades and renovations will be much easier. This one-to-many approach can be called a multi-domain controller (MD) in a car, but it is currently not used in mass-produced cars.
If you have paid more attention to automotive electronics in the past two years, you should know that Audi has exhibited an autonomous driving control module named z, which can actually be understood as Audi's customized version of Delphi's multi-domain controller. Audi has shown two versions of Z. The second version is more streamlined and more integrated than the first version.
It looks like a motherboard. Taking the second generation as an example, the chips integrated on it include: rrq, bit, MQ, processor, which can realize complete data, planning, and decision-making processing. Moreover, from the sensor to this motherboard, Ethernet is used to transmit data. Moreover, in addition to autonomous driving functions, it also integrates many functions related to vehicle control.
Delphi engineers also gave an example: when the LCD instrument panel and the central control screen use the same processing chip, they will become more closely integrated and work together to display different content and provide better H experience.
How important is integration?
In fact, this reason is not difficult to understand. Maybe when we buy and use a car, we only look at its appearance, power, and handling, but in fact, behind these things, the electronic and electrical architecture of the car is the real skeleton. Most of today's cars still use the same old skeleton, but the reality is that cars are becoming more and more intelligent, and it is difficult for traditional electronic architecture to meet this demand (as mentioned earlier), so it is necessary to The car uses a brand-new architecture to respond to this intelligent trend.
Of course, stronger computing power is a must. From another perspective, it is precisely because of the improvement of intelligence that cars have higher and higher requirements for electronic security. A more integrated architecture helps to better deploy defense mechanisms. The integration of chips means that the car truly becomes a whole. If the car of the future is a computer + four wheels, then a computer means bringing together all the processing chips that used to be scattered around (of course, not all of them can be integrated). Everyone likes to talk about the system, but this is actually a change in the system. Let’s talk about autonomous driving again. As the level of autonomous driving continues to improve, the trend of chip integration will become more and more obvious.
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