The drive towards autonomous and connected mobility is dramatically re-defining vehicle architecture as we know today. The car will become the ultimate 'mobile device', a 'data centre on wheels' characterised by software and no longer mechanics - all using ethernet as a core component explained Mike Jones, Senior Marketing Manager, Automotive Ethernet Microchip at the 'Evolution or Revolution?' The All-Ethernet In-Vehicle Network' IET Webinar.
Mike spoke about how Ethernet's durability will allow the hardware components to become domain specific but also responsive to applications buses, enabling about the concept of the software defined car - which will have over 100 million lines of code enabling dynamic cloud-based applications.
PCIe technology is to play a big role in ethernet evolution and along with bandwidth advances and now zonal approaches provide autonomous vehicles progressive centralised vehicle computing. He reviewed that about 4 TB of data will be consumed by the car per day, as the multitude of sensors that interact autonomously will produce data that will need to be processed at speed for vehicle operations. These data sets will naturally feed security and safety which is going to play a very important part in autonomous adoption. Inter-connectivity between next generation virtual switches are expected to have an overlay of core security principals applied to components on low level architecture designs including secure boot, authentication, crypto requirements and deep packet inspection which extend out throughout the ecosystem.
He mentioned 3 challenges, the first is 'Complexity challenges' of network security that is expected to give opportunities to leverage data centre security and smart switches, 'Bandwidth challenges' that compute System on Chip (SoC) high speed inter-connectivity that will give opportunities to leverage data centre expertise and 'Cost challenges' for total cost of ownership that will give opportunities for ubiquitous ethernet networks.
This was an insightful webinar that explained why 'ethernet' will be the go-to technology to overcome these challenges to bring about the required vehicle connectivity - albeit eventually - In the mean time we can watch flashback episodes of a particular talking car popularised in the 80's.