Vehicle complexity is growing
Vehicles are becoming more complex everyday. Customers expect safe, autonomous, connected, electrified and shared vehicles and these features are achieved via software. Although there is a clear change in focus from hardware to software, the advent of software-defined vehicles will rely heavily on optimised Electrical / Electronic (E/E) vehicle architectures.
To make way for this changing paradigm, big hardware changes need to take place. In this post, we will study the trends and evolutions of E/E architecture and identify the ones that fit best with a software-defined approach.
From basic and discrete to complex and integrated
The first generations of E/E architecture didn’t have many Electronic Control Unit (ECUs) to handle. To put it simply, ECUs are embedded computing systems. Indeed, at that time, vehicles were Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) powered, had a radio-cassette system (with CD-reading capabilities for the lucky ones),…