Continental to Work with Infineon on Vehicle Architectures
Continental now uses Infineon's AURIX TC4 microcontroller for its ZCU platform.
Continental has teamed up with Infineon Technologies AG in the development of server-based vehicle architectures.
The goal is an organized and efficient electrics/electronics (E/E) architecture with central high-performance computers (HPC) and a few, powerful Zone Control Units (ZCU) instead of up to a hundred or even more individual control units, as it was previously the case.
Continental now uses Infineon’s AURIX TC4 microcontroller for its ZCU platform.
Thanks to special storage technology in the AURIX TC4, the vehicle software is on standby. As soon as the vehicle is started, functions such as parking assistance, air conditioning, heating and suspension are ready within fractions of a second.
With its platform approach, Continental is supporting the different requirements of automobile manufacturers.
“With our new architecture solution, we are making the vehicle fit for the future,” says Gilles Mabire, CTO Continental Automotive. “The growing variety of vehicle functions requires more and more computing power and increasingly complex software applications. Continental’s new architecture is paving the way for the software-defined vehicle. The cooperation with Infineon is an essential step in realizing this development quickly for our customers. Thanks to our platform strategy, proven application software can be used in new vehicle models, for instance. As a result, the time-consuming validation effort is significantly reduced. New functionalities can be brought into serial production much faster.”
The third generation of the AURIX microcontroller family, TC4x, offers the same scalability in terms of performance, memory and housing variants as the previous generations, AURIX TC2x and TC3x. Among other things, AURIX TC4x was designed for usage in ZCU and HPC. Further focus applications are radar, chassis and safety and powertrain/electrification.
“The cooperation with Continental makes it possible to bring RRAM technology into automobiles,” says Peter Schiefer, President of the Automotive Division at Infineon. “Together with innovation drivers in the automotive industry like Continental, we are shaping the mobility of tomorrow. The microcontroller family AURIX TC4x is an important building block for the next generation of E/E architectures and can make the crucial difference when it comes to efficiency, safety and comfort in future vehicle generations.”
The use of powerful Zone Control Units is the next decisive step towards a software-defined vehicle. For Continental, the first major step was the development and delivery of an HPC high-performance computer for the electric vehicle models ID.3 and ID.4 from Volkswagen.
The zone control unit platform, to be developed as part of the cooperation with Infineon, forms the middle level of the electrics/electronics architecture between the server level (HPC) and the base level with numerous sensors and actuators. “We offer all essential components for software-defined vehicle architectures from a single source. The new platform is scalable as well as modular in terms of performance and interfaces. As a result, we can offer maximum flexibility to automobile manufacturers for designing vehicle architecture,” says Jean-Francois Tarabbia, Head of the Business Unit Architecture and Networking at Continental. “Moreover, we enable the integration of third-party hardware and software in order to introduce innovative solutions quickly and cost-effectively.”
“Our new vehicle architecture, consisting of a few powerful zone control units and high-performance computers simplifies the wiring harness substantially. It saves weight and energy,” says Tarabbia. “Thanks to a clear division of tasks in the organized vehicle electronics, the separation of hardware and software and lastly, the necessary standardization of interfaces, the growing complexity and an almost exploding scope of software inside the vehicle can be managed in a much better way.”
