Turning cars into data centers on wheels
Vehicles continue to evolve. Not many years ago, it would be unusual for your phone to connect to your car via Bluetooth for hands-free calling. Today, we’re on the cusp of using our phones to automatically unlock our cars as we approach them, using ultra-wideband (UWB) technology.
Inside the car there’s even more change happening. Complex wiring looms are giving way to high-speed busses. Electronic control units (ECUs) are becoming small computers, software is the new hardware. Functions are becoming services, as the industry moves towards a service-oriented architecture.
While this will create new opportunities, it doesn’t come without some challenges. One of those challenges is handling the exponential increase in data that vehicles now generate. Modern vehicles generate gigabytes of data every hour, but autonomous vehicles are expected to generate terabytes.
Today, only one communications technology can handle that level of traffic. It’s the same technology that enables data centers to deliver broadband to and within our homes, offices and factories. Ethernet will become the most important of all protocols used in vehicles.
Moving a technology designed for data centers onto the road hasn’t happened without considerable effort. That effort is ongoing, as the requirements for in-vehicle networking continue to be redefined. As Timothy Lau, senior director of automotive networking products at Marvell Semiconductor, explained to Jason Struble, Avnet transportation supplier manager during this recent webinar: “The car has changed significantly over the last 10 to 15 years.” Lau cited the shift from cruise control to adaptive cruise control, the massive change in infotainment and, less obvious, the use of telematics to connect vehicles to cellular networks.
Driving up your car’s data bandwidth demands
As vehicles take on more complex features and become service-oriented architectures, they will generate and consume even more data. (Source: Marvell Semiconductor)“Vehicles are becoming data centers on wheels,” Lau said. In that context, it makes perfect sense to use a technology designed for data centers as the data backbone in cars. Lau also recognizes the need to bring the safety and security demands of the automotive market to the Ethernet domain.
This is something of a game-changer in the automotive industry. It is more familiar, and perhaps more comfortable, with building its own solutions from the ground up, as Struble pointed out on the webinar with Lau. But as Lau observed, the automotive industry wanted to leverage the ubiquitous nature of standard Ethernet because it is mature. It also provides the headroom to increase bandwidth as it becomes necessary.
This puts companies like Marvell in the position of developing automotive-qualified Ethernet solutions that meet the security, safety, low power and high performance demands of the automotive domain.
How do they do that? Well, as Lau explained in the webinar, it involves integrating new standards such as IEEE 802.1AE (also known as MACsec). Lau explains the benefits of MACsec over IPsec in this application area. Functional safety features need to be built-in to the switch. It also needs a good understanding of the potential attack points for Ethernet in a vehicle network and how to protect the system against those attacks.
Making networks fail-safe
Functional safety is an overriding requirement for any technology integrated into a vehicle. This isn’t something that standard Ethernet addresses. But, as Lau pointed out, this is a critical requirement in the automotive space. Marvell has put a lot of effort into ensuring its Ethernet switches are fully functional-safety certified.
Details of what that means in practice are covered in more depth in the webinar. Lau also goes into how asymmetric data transfer can be implemented using Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE). Lau explains why the features offered by EEE will be more necessary in the near future, as the number of sensors used in vehicles continues to increase.
Ethernet is being adopted by the automotive industry to deliver multi-Gbps speeds across the data backbone. It provides just what the industry needs right now, but also has the scope to expand as bandwidth demands continue to increase. The real challenges relate to how Ethernet now needs to be more secure and integrate functional safety.
To hear how Marvell is addressing these challenges and helping engineers implement in-vehicle networking based on Ethernet, watch the full webinar. It is available free and on demand by visiting the How Ethernet will transform the auto industry page.
