Electronic Architectures Get Smart

Upgradable, scalable and powerful new architectures will help enable data-hungry connected, autonomous vehicles.

August 1, 2018

Lee Bauer

‘Smart’ architectures engineered to meet the demands of the higher levels of autonomous driving will offer capability far beyond today’s configurations. (Credit: Aptiv)

The mobility industry is experiencing the biggest disruption in its 125-year history, evolving at a pace that demands flexibility. There is an urgent need to remove all barriers in vehicle design and engineering to deliver a holistic, total-system solution to support safe, efficient and affordable products. And that urgency begins with a complete re-thinking of the vehicle’s electrical/electronic architecture.

Comprising a ‘brain’ (software and computational processing) and ‘nervous system’ (sensors and power/data distribution), today’s architectures have become exceedingly complex and inflexible. Many have more than 100 computers per vehicle, each of them added to support a new feature. There are typically 25% more electrical circuits than five years ago — and we expect that number will increase by another 30% five years from now. Wiring and cabling has grown literally by a mile in length, on average, bringing packaging challenges and additional mass.

The steady growth of electrical and electronic systems complexity is shown in ghosted illustrations of typical SUVs from 2000 and 2020. (Credit: Aptiv))

Due to increasing demand for software-enabled features, vehicle computing requirements in the not-too-distant future are expected to increase drastically compared to those of today. One measure of that is “flops” — the number of complex operations calculated each second. Today’s vehicles are completing significantly less than a teraflop – or 1 trillion – operations a second. This equates to the computing power of less than one iPhone 7. That’s expected to increase to over 200 teraflops in the future – the computing power of more than 500 iPhone 7’s. It’s not a stretch to say the typical car is becoming a supercomputer — a data center on wheels.

Data speeds during the past decade have risen steadily from < 10 megabytes per second to today’s range of one gigabyte per second — but much, much faster speeds are needed for self-driving cars and cloud connectivity.

A single connected and autonomous vehicle will generate 40 terabytes of uncompressed data per hour — about 3,000 times the volume of data generated daily by Twitter's 270 million users! This staggering mountain of data will require more than 200 teraflops of processing power. That’s 200 million complex operations per second.

Put simply, your vehicle exchanges 15,000 pieces of data in the time it takes to blink. By 2020, that number is expected to jump to roughly 100,000. This means the traditional architecture approach will no longer be viable to support the growth in vehicle content and complexity and to run the vehicle’s software algorithms. The network infrastructure cannot support the data transfer speeds of the future.

Clearly, in terms of power and speed, current-generation vehicle architectures are not up to the task. The solution is to move to an upgradable and scalable “smart” architecture. These will capture all the electrification, active safety, automation, and connectivity features that consumers increasingly expect, while paving the way for autonomous driving.

Prioritizing safety and affordability

Think of the ‘brain’ first and foremost as software-enabled vehicle features, including active safety and autonomous systems, infotainment and user experience, and data and services. The exponential increase in compute power of advanced chipsets will effectively transform the vehicle into a server platform capable of delivering the features and services required for smart mobility. Underpinning all of this is the new ‘nervous system’ — a reliable/resilient data network that gets the right data to the right place at the right time.

More features...more computing power...more data...and more power distribution than ever before require radical changes in architectures. And smart vehicle technology must be safe and affordable. How do we guarantee the system is fail operational? And if there is a failure in either computing or networking, how do we create redundancy?

Unfortunately, if we were to physically try to take the existing available space in today’s vehicles and account for redundancy by doubling the affected components to create a fail-operational design, this level of redundancy in its purest form would not fit. (Fail-operational performance, an aerospace term, means that after one failure in a system, redundancy management allows the vehicle to continue its mission. After any failure, the vehicle is capable of returning home safely.)

We then challenged ourselves to answer the question: What is the redundancy needed to guarantee a three-layer fail operational design? And then, how do we consolidate those features to be affordable and flexible enough to actually fit in the vehicle?

Aptiv is the first technology company to examine the complete system holistically. First, we break it into two buckets — data (used to support the movement of information around the vehicle; think of it as the part of wiring that allows the vehicle to sense) and power, which allows energy to be moved around the vehicle.

Fewer controllers

To enable the SAE Level 4/5 autonomous vehicles of the future, we must ensure the networking capability is in place to move data, in real time, from the vehicle’s sensors to its compute platforms. New technologies like HDBaseT and evolving automotive Ethernet help provide the high transfer speeds required to make autonomous driving a reality.

Smart architecture engineered to meet the demands of the higher levels of autonomous driving will offer capability beyond today’s configurations. Their multi-domain controller ‘brains’ can process massive amounts of data and manage multiple electronic sub-systems simultaneously — unlike current domains that control, in most cases, one function at a time.

This brings increased computing power in larger (more powerful) but substantially fewer controllers.

Moving forward, Aptiv sees three critical considerations for a smart vehicle architecture. One is a flexible software framework with a tailor-made computing, data and power distribution network designed to support it. Second, are the software-defined features and compute power that are separated enabling independent lifecycles.

Finally, there’s resiliency — the need for the system to contemplate and address multilayer system fault tolerance, while meeting redundancy requirements for the highest level of automotive safety integrity.

Evolution and revolution

There is no one single solution when it comes to how wiring is routed. Rather, there are thousands of flexible approaches to any vehicle platform, depending on the customer’s requirements.

We see three approaches based on where we are in the life-cycle and the need to capture desired customer feature growth.

One approach is to optimize. While a vehicle’s commercial cycle usually lasts six years, we like to look at it during the lifecycle and provide suggestions on how to realize improvement that are minimally invasive. This allows engineers to validate what’s working, optimize that output, and determine what can be improved. Optimization also allows the vehicle to remain relevant with respect to functionality, without extensive rewiring.

Another approach is evolutionary: expand existing architecture capability, maintain some legacy elements and allow for new features and functions.

And then we have Smart architecture which is more of a revolution. It picks up where evolution is no longer feasible, delivering new concepts to address the new mobility services of the future. Autonomous driving requires Automotive Safety Integrity Level D — essentially fail-safe operation. This requirement drives the revolution or an electrical architecture break. With it come deep implications on each of the three critical system levels — power distribution, networking distribution, and compute. We call this three-layer fail operational design.

Lee Bauer is Aptiv’s Vice President of Mobility Architecture Group.

A three-layer fail operational design approach is about resilience. It considers power failure, network failure and even compute failure. It is the ability to dynamically re-route power, network traffic and even decision making to bring an autonomous car to a safe stop. Our extensive system design expertise in all three layers delivers the necessary IP for fail-safe operation — the foundation for any smart vehicle architecture.

Traditional vehicle architectures never contemplated nor were designed to support the explosion of content and features in an effective, cost-efficient manner. They have become the limiting factor. They must adapt — and become smarter.