Engineering news
Moore’s Law, coined by the founder of Intel Gordon Moore, notes that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubles roughly every year. But even that might not be enough to keep up with the huge demands of autonomous and connected vehicles in future.
“You clearly see the order of magnitude increase in the amount of data you need to move around,” said David Paja, president of Delphi Electronics and Safety, during an event at the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders in London today. “That is also driving the need for increased computing power. Traditionally computing power increase tends to follow Moore's law (…) but when you think about moving to a fully autonomous vehicle, actually the demand for computing increase is actually exponential. It doesn't follow a linear curve, it grows exponentially.”
Delphi predicts a massive increase in the number of systems being monitored to provide early warning of issues on vehicles.
In 2016, a car has 280 connections to manage power and data, and that’s expecting to rise to as high as 350 by the 2020s. The amount of cabling per vehicle could increase from 1.9 miles to 3.1m, and vehicles will exchange 100,000 data messages per second.
At the moment, an average car has around 65Mb/s of data to transfer around between the various electronic control units. In the future, that could grow by a factor of 90, to more than 6GB/s.
"If you look at a mobile phone you see a saturation, and that you don't need much more processing power, but automotive needs more processing power," said Martin Bornemann, who works on infotainment systems and displays at Delphi. "What we are currently doing is using more than one chip side by side. We get a lot of processing power in smaller structures from the silicon industry but it's not enough in a single chip to fulfil these kind of activities," he said.
Paja said that the way the electronic systems for cars are designed “doesn’t scale” and would have to be rethought. At the moment, some cars have 50 different electronic control units (ECUs) for various parts, often made by different manufacturers. Delphi is predicting a move away from that towards a simpler system with a ‘brain’ made up of three large computers, and then a handful of smaller ECUs comprising the car's ‘nervous system’.
The brain would be split into ‘active safety and autonomous functions,’ ‘data and services, and ‘infotainment and user experience’. “I don't think there's been a situation in automotive history where you've had so many disruptive forces happening at the same time,” said Paja. “In itself, electrification would be a disruptive force. But autonomous driving is another disruptive force, and data connectivity is another disruptive force, and the three of them are actually happening together at the same time, which is very unique.”