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Automotive: The Design Engineer's Guide

Long Copy

Automotive communications and connectivity

Rapid advancements in automotive technologies are enabling a new wave of vehicle communications systems and protocols. V2X standards will allow road vehicles to communicate directly with each other, enabling greater safety on increasingly crowded roads, with the road and traffic infrastructure, with cloud-based services, and even with the energy grid. This communication should make vehicles more economical to operate, as well as enabling new capabilities.

Making such communication possible, though, will mean solving a series of design challenges in a rapidly evolving regulatory environment and complex engineering context. Wireless protocols will require careful selection, while the in-vehicle connectivity needs to combat environmental conditions and complex RF environments to achieve reliable and consistent communications. Not only this, but increased numbers of devices such as automotive cameras, LiDAR, and other safety systems need to integrate with a vehicle's infotainment systems. This puts more emphasis on electronic component selection than ever before, and passive devices and interconnects are key to smooth operation of these systems.

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Understanding vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication

For a long time, vehicles have been relatively insular – they have received radio signals for audio entertainment for decades, and more recently, have become ‘connected’ to enhance functionality such as navigation and provide some streaming services. However, advanced communication such as V2V is becoming central to vehicle operation as automakers see this as a way of delivering enhanced road safety, increased efficiency / economy and an improved experience for driver and passengers – eventually leading to fully autonomous vehicles.

Here we will look at how V2V technology enables all forms of road transport (cars, lorries, buses, vans and motorcycles among others) to communicate directly with each other, and explore the key design challenges for engineers - negotiating the regulatory environment and selecting the optimum component solutions.

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Understanding vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is a subset of a wider term, vehicle-to-everything (V2X), which also encompasses vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle to pedestrian (V2P) communication.

V2X will use a mesh network approach, with each vehicle being a node on the network, capable of sending and receiving messages as well as relaying them, thereby creating an expansive network where it’s needed most – in highly populated areas. Here we examine the challenges that designers will face, and the considerations for passive and connectivity solutions.

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Automotive Ethernet

Many of today's vehicles have upwards of 100 electronic control units onboard. Each of these generally exists as a stand-alone unit which needs to communicate with the others, and a central system. While a number of protocols have been developed for automotive networking over the years, their bandwidth does not meet the requirements of modern applications.

Modern in-vehicle networking protocols need to support faster data rates and provide lower latency than existing solutions, while reducing cable length to reduce cost and improve efficiency. Here we look at why the automotive industry is moving towards Ethernet as the preferred solution, and how to navigate design challenges and component selection for automotive systems.