Electronic Control Unit Hardware Design Challenges for Software Defined Vehicle

Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) is gaining attraction in the automotive industry due to its wide range of benefits like remote software/feature upgrade, scalable functionality, Electronic Control Unit (ECU) commonization, remote diagnostics, increased safety, etc. To obtain all these benefits, ECUs need to be designed accordingly. ECU hardware must be designed to support a range of vehicles with a variety of loading, scalable features, power distribution, levels of processing, and networking architecture. Each domain has unique challenges to make the ECU economical and robust to operating conditions without compromising performance. This paper illustrates the critical hardware design challenges to accommodate a scalable SDV architecture. This paper focuses electrical interface design to support wide range of input/output port loads, scalable functionality, and robust diagnostics. Also, flexibility of microprocessor processing capability, ECU networking, and communication complexity are discussed.