Software defining cars is more than just a slogan.
The hardware is standardized and the software can be upgraded. In addition to the appearance and interior, the difference between cars has shifted from the power system to the application level. Smart driving and smart cockpit become new selling points.
Cars are becoming more and more like mobile phones. But compared with mobile phones, cars are undoubtedly too complicated.
In the early days, each function on the vehicle needed a separate ECU to realize. On the one hand, too many parts make the whole vehicle extremely complicated, and the cost and body weight remain high. At the same time, the property of tight coupling between software and hardware also makes it difficult for cars to achieve iterative upgrading.
The central computing architecture perfectly solves these problems. Different ECUs are gradually integrated into domain controllers, and multiple domain controllers continue to integrate, eventually forming a layout of one central computing platform+N regional controllers.
Under this architecture, not only the vehicle structure is simplified, but also the software and hardware are decoupled, the hardware is modularized, the software can be updated quickly, and the vehicle iterative upgrade is possible.
The chip is the underlying foundation supporting the central computing architecture.
The central computing platform needs to meet the needs and characteristics of each domain, so it needs cross domain chips with stronger computing power and can support multiple operating systems. The regional controller, due to the integration of more functions, also needs a higher performance MCU control chip.
At this year's Beijing Auto Show, Qualcomm, Centric, Black Sesame and other chip companies focused on cross domain integration chips. In addition, Centro directly proposed the "1+N" central computing+regional control architecture, and released the central computing processor and regional controller chip family under the "1+N" architecture.
The implementation and popularization of central computing architecture is imminent.
Tess has made a good start
In the history of electric vehicle innovation, there is Tesla behind almost every technology.
Similarly, at the electronic and electrical architecture level, Tesla is also the first car company to adopt the central plus regional controller scheme.
However, the domain controller is not Tesla's first. As the core supplier of the global automotive supply chain, Bosch is one of the enterprises that first proposed the concept of domain controller. But Bosch's idea is to integrate ECU according to function. According to different functions, the whole vehicle is divided into five domains: driving assistance, safety, vehicle sports, entertainment information, and body electronics. Different domains are connected through domain controllers and gateways. However, ECUs with different functions are distributed in different positions of the vehicle body, and each domain still needs more complex harness connections.
Tesla adopts the scheme of distributing area controllers according to their positions.
Taking Model 3 as an example, Model 3 consists of four domains, namely central computing module, front body control module, left body control module and right body control module.
The central computing module is mainly responsible for the functions of intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit, and the area controller integrates multiple functions of the surrounding body area according to its location.
The control part of each domain controller is mainly executed by MCU.
Because the domain controller is integrated according to the location, Tesla's solution can greatly reduce the amount of wiring harness in the vehicle. It is said that the length of the whole vehicle harness of Model S and Model X is 3km, that of Model 3 is shortened to 1.5km, and that of Model Y is further shortened to about 1km.
Tesla's scheme has become the mainstream that car enterprises follow today.
Many people are working with Leifeng (Official account: Lei Fengwang) In the communication with New Smart Drive, it was said that central computing plus regional control has become the most mainstream architecture, and domestic OEMs are pushing this architecture.
The electronic and electrical architecture of the MEB platform launched by Volkswagen is divided into three major domain controllers: vehicle controller, intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit. The vehicle controller can realize the integration of all control functions of the vehicle, such as power management, torque control, body electronic control, gateway, storage and other functions.
Xiaopeng Automobile said that its EEA electronic and electrical architecture has entered the era of 3.5, which can realize the hardware architecture of "central supercomputing+regional control".
In April, Xiaopeng also announced that it would jointly develop the electronic and electrical architecture for Volkswagen's electric vehicle platform in the Chinese market with Volkswagen Group, and would integrate the latest generation of electronic and electrical architecture of Xiaopeng based on central computing and domain controllers. The architecture is expected to be applied to Volkswagen brand electric vehicles produced in China from 2026.
Because of the importance of chips in the implementation of the entire central computing architecture, chip enterprises are also supporters of the development of the central computing architecture. Among them, Centro, which makes product layout for central computing and regional control architecture, stands out in the industry.
Cross domain integration is not easy, but changes have taken place
Central computing platform and regional controller are two major components of central computing architecture.
As the vehicle brain, the central computing platform mainly integrates the functions of intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit, and has higher requirements for products and technologies. The ultimate goal of the industry is to achieve cross domain integration with one chip. However, cabin and driving integration is not easy, especially for the single chip cabin and driving integration scheme.
Sun Mingle, CTO of Centric Technology, believes that the main difficulty of cabin driving integration is that, first of all, the functional safety level of intelligent driving domain and cockpit domain is different, and the functional safety level of ADAS will be higher. With a single chip, the entire chip needs to reach the functional safety level of ADAS.
Second, after the fusion of the two domains, the requirements for heat dissipation will be higher. The original cockpit domain and intelligent driving domain are separate. When they are put together, the power consumption increases, making it more difficult to do thermal design.
Similarly, in terms of complexity, the original two hardware are decoupled from each other with limited interaction. After integration, many interactions are completed inside the chip. Although it will be more efficient, it will be more difficult to run more things on a processor from the perspective of bottom software architecture.
Moreover, it is more difficult to develop and debug a function after integration than to debug it separately.
In addition, there are still many changes in the functional planning and definition of the intelligent driving part in the cabin driving integration. How to drive and how to integrate the cabin remains to be discussed in the product planning.
In addition to the technology itself, the coordination between different departments of the automobile enterprise is also the reason why the industry thinks it is difficult to achieve cabin driving integration.
Shen Ziyu, the chairman and CEO of Jixing Technology, said in the communication with New Smart Drive on Leifeng.com that the cockpit and intelligent driving of the automobile company are in the charge of two departments. After the integration of cabin and driving, the merger of the two departments will lead to conflicts. Who should be responsible? This is an organizational culture issue. Only when the automobile company solves this problem can the integration of cabin and driving be promoted smoothly.
Even so, the task of chip manufacturers is to prepare their products first, and then they will have the opportunity to jointly promote the implementation of cabin and driving integration with car enterprises. At present, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have both released cabin and car integration chips among the major international manufacturers. On the domestic market, Black Sesame also released a cross domain integration chip, and exhibited two products of its C1200 family at this Beijing Auto Show, of which C1296 can achieve cross domain integration function with a single chip.
In addition, Centrino not only released the central computing chip X9CC in this auto show, but also jointly demonstrated the industry's first central computing unit X-Center 2.0 equipped with X9CC chip with Neusoft Ruichi. It provides the car enterprises with a highly technologically advanced and cost-effective cabin and car integration solution.
X-Center 2.0 covers the diversified intelligent functions of the whole vehicle through one chip of X9CC, providing 40 TOPS AI computing power, 200 KDMIPS CPU computing power, 440 GFLOPS 3D rendering computing power, and supporting microphone, audio, Bluetooth, 4G network, voice vision multimodal interaction and other modules. Combined with the underlying hard isolation design scheme, security isolation and independent operation between different domains are realized.
According to the insiders, the first thing to do is to drive multiple screens, and the chip should at least drive the instrument screen and the main display screen at the same time. However, most smart driving chips do not have the ability to drive multiple screens.
Therefore, suppliers in the cockpit field have greater advantages when making cabin and driver integration chips.
According to incomplete statistics of Gaogong Intelligent Automobile Research Institute, at present, the layout and landing speed of suppliers in the field of intelligent cockpit are much faster than those in the field of intelligent driving in terms of cross domain capabilities. The advantage of Xinchi lies in its rich experience in cockpit products and higher cost performance.
Regional controllers move towards integration, creating new opportunities for high-performance MCU track
Regional controller is another important part of central computing architecture.
From the classification of vehicle domain control, today's vehicle domain control can be divided into body domain, chassis domain, power domain, as well as intelligent driving domain and intelligent cockpit domain.
With the integrated development of the whole vehicle, in addition to the intelligent driving domain and cockpit domain integrated into the central control domain, the rest of the body domain, chassis domain and power domain are also gradually integrated.
According to Zhang Xitong, director of Xinchi Technology Products and Marketing, many OEMs are currently making regional controllers, but each product is different. For most car enterprises, the typical idea is to first integrate the functions of the body, including the door, window lights and other equipment, and then integrate the power and chassis functions.
Zhang Xitong believes that the future trend is that there will be many car manufacturers to do cross domain integration, integrating the body domain, power domain and chassis domain into the regional controller, which puts forward higher requirements for the performance of the MCU master chip of the regional controller.
First of all, cross domain integration represents more integrated functions and requires higher processing capacity of MCU.
Secondly, the requirements for safety will also increase. Cross domain integration of regional controllers usually refers to the transition from the body domain to the power and chassis domain, which has higher requirements for safety, so related MCU needs higher functional safety and information security mechanisms.
Third, in cross domain integration, due to the collection of different services, MCU products also need to be virtualized and isolated.
At this Beijing Auto Show, Centrino released a new generation of MCU chip product family for regional controllers, and launched its flagship product E3650.
E3650 adopts the latest Arm Cortex R52+multi-core cluster, with higher real-time and security performance. At the same time, this product integrates the Xuanwu super security HSM information security module, meets the information security standards of ISO 21434, Evita Full and above, and meets the reliability of AEC-Q100 Grade 1 and the functional security level of ISO 26262 ASIL D, which can not only realize the cross domain integration of the body, chassis and power domain, but also better support the needs of vehicle models going to sea.
With the advancement of cross domain integration, the importance of high-performance MCU products will become increasingly prominent.
In the international market, enterprises such as STC and Infineon have also launched regional controller chip products that can support cross domain functions. In the domestic market, compared with most domestic similar enterprises, the MCU products of Centro have obvious advantages in terms of performance, safety and mass production experience.
At present, more than 4.5 million pieces of smart cockpit and smart car control products have been shipped by Centric.
It is an inevitable trend for the electronic and electrical architecture of the whole vehicle to be centralized, and the support of the underlying chip products has laid a strong foundation for the realization of the central integrated architecture.
According to some industry opinions, this transformation is expected to be completed by 2025. From 2025, the era of cross domain integration will officially open.
