Cost Efficient Integration for Decentralized Automotive ECU

As the demand for enhanced comfort, safety and differentiation with new features continues to grow and as electronics and software enable most of these, the number of electronic units or components within automobiles will continue to increase.

This will increase the overall system complexity, specifically with respect to the number of controller actuators such as e-motors. However, hard constraints on cost and on physical boundaries such as maximum power dissipation per unit and pin-count per unit/connector require new solutions to alternative system partitioning. Vehicle manufacturers, as well as system and semiconductor suppliers are striving for increased scalability and modularity to allow for most cost optimal high volume configurations while featuring platform reuse and feature differentiation.

This paper presents new semiconductor based approaches with respect to technologies, technology mapping and assembly technologies. These products allow systems to be efficiently integrated into a single package that enables decentralization of sub functions into intelligent (e.g. mechatronic) modules while offering overall system cost savings. Solutions are presented to apparently contradicting requirements between standardization and optimization. Mechatronic electric motor control integration for body (door) applications is used to illustrate the benefits and architectural considerations.