Automobile electronic products are one of the hot spots in the development of the automobile industry at present, and have many special application requirements. Reconfigurable computing is an emerging computing technology, and its efficient and flexible computing model can greatly meet the needs of automotive electronic products.
This article starts with the analysis of the application needs of automotive electronic products, discusses the application prospects of reconfigurable computing technology in the automotive electronics industry, and analyzes some existing problems.
1 Introduction
After more than 100 years of development, the mechanical structure of the automobile has reached a near perfect level, and it is difficult for the industry to improve the mechanical performance of the automobile. In order to improve the reliability, functionality and comfort of automobiles, electronic technology is widely used in automobiles. The combination of electronic technology and mechanical structure is considered to be a "revolution" in the current development of automotive technology.
Automotive electronic technology is the core technology in automotive design. The degree of automobile electronics is an important indicator of the development level of a country's automobile industry. Automobile designers use automotive electronics technology to develop new models and use it as the most important technical solution for improving and improving the overall level of automobiles; automakers have increased the number of automotive electronic devices by accelerating the process of automotive electronics Such measures as the new selling point of automobiles and the most important means to seize the future automobile market. At present, in the design of medium and high-end cars in the world, automotive electronic products have accounted for an average of 27% of automobile manufacturing costs. This number continues to create new highs. According to Infineon's forecast, by 2010 the expenditures on automotive electronic devices used in cars will average 50% of vehicle manufacturing costs. In China, the average application rate of automotive electronic equipment per car is 5.5 times lower than the international level [1]. The development and application of automotive electronic technology is a major opportunity and challenge facing the progress of China's automotive industry.
Reconfigurable computing technology took shape in the mid-1990s [2]. As shown in Figure 1, the main idea is to use the reconfigurable features of reconfigurable logic devices (such as FPGA) to change the functions implemented by the device through different device configuration files, so that it can flexibly implement multiple applications with the performance of the hardware . The reconfigurable computing technology avoids the performance loss caused by the fetching and decoding steps of the microprocessor computing mode, and also eliminates the high cost and complexity caused by the complex process of early design and manufacturing of the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) computing mode. Do not reuse defects. Reconfigurable computing technology has been applied in many fields, such as target matching, large-scale numerical operations, etc., and has achieved very good results.
Automotive electronic products have many special needs, and reconfigurable computing as an emerging technology, with high performance, high flexibility, low development cycle, low cost and other characteristics is very suitable for automotive electronics applications.
2 Demand analysis in the field of automotive electronics
Since 1950, GM of the United States has pioneered the application of semiconductor technology in the field of automobile manufacturing. Starting from the installation of transistor radios in automobiles, the automotive electronics industry has undergone more than 50 years of development. At present, it has formed a variety of functions, technology integration, and systems. Technical features such as integration, communication networking, and technical standardization. At present, automotive electronics technology has entered the research stage of optimizing the overall relationship between human beings, vehicles and the environment. While satisfying safety, energy saving and environmental protection, automobiles will further meet people's needs in life and develop towards comfort, convenience, high efficiency, digitalization, informatization and intelligence.
There are two main application areas for automotive electronics technology: one is the automotive electronic control system, and the other is the in-vehicle automotive electronic device [3]. Among them, the automotive electronic control system is a combination of mechanical and electronic automotive electronic products, its working conditions will directly affect the performance of the car. The on-board automotive electronic device is an electronic device that can be used independently in an automotive environment, and its performance does not affect the performance of the car. In contrast, the design and development of automotive electronic control systems involves the two disciplines of machinery and electronics. The research and development of these two parts must be coordinated, so the entire process is more complicated. On-board electronic devices are an expansion of applications in the IT industry in the automotive field. There are many types, such as remote control central door locks, on-board phones, rear seat entertainment systems, GPS navigation systems, on-board computers, and so on. Because these products have nothing to do with the performance of the vehicle, they can be developed independently, so compared with the automotive electronic control system, the development process is relatively simple.
The main requirements for the development of electronic technology in the field of automotive electronics are as follows:
High performance.
At present, the most demanding part of automotive electronic products is the infotainment system in the car. An infotainment system may include a multi-channel audio system, DVD player, GPS navigation system, and hands-free mobile phone. The functions involved in these subsystems (such as video processing and other operations) require powerful signal processing capabilities and have extremely high performance requirements. In addition, with the deepening of the car's active safety concept, the new car safety system has begun to use image, video and radar processing. At the same time, the engine and brake control system will also use more complex calculation control strategies. The huge amount of real-time calculation will be in Play an important role when dealing with emergencies. This also poses challenges to the processing capabilities of related automotive electronic products.
Flexible.
A serious problem for both car designers and manufacturers is to ensure that the life of automotive electronic equipment matches the life of the car. The life cycle of automotive electronic equipment is very short. The emergence of emerging automotive standards and the continuous changes in the standards themselves further lead to the selection of standards that must take into account their longevity, flexibility, and the degree of acceptance. In order to ensure that automotive electronic products can closely follow the development of the automotive industry, automotive electronic products are required to have considerable flexibility so that they can make timely changes according to demand. This demand for automotive electronics technology is particularly important when various new technical standards are emerging one after another, and the industry lacks standards that have an absolute advantage.
High reliability.
As a special kind of products, automobiles often work in harsh environments, which puts strict requirements on the reliability of electronic products used in them. The precision of electronic products makes it an important factor affecting the reliability and safety of the entire vehicle. Especially in the automotive electronic control system, the high temperature working environment will often cause damage to electronic products, which greatly increases the danger of the entire vehicle. This requires that electronic products can withstand the interference of the harsh working environment, and at the same time have appropriate fault tolerance, and can minimize the impact caused by partial damage. Short development time.
It is one of the goals pursued by automotive designers and manufacturers to shorten the development time of new models and products as much as possible. Figure 2 shows that the development cycle of new technologies in automotive electronics is very short. This requires the research and development of automotive electronics technology to have a convenient and fast development platform, and continuity and reusability in technology research and development, as much as possible to shorten the development time. Especially in the research and development of in-vehicle automotive electronic devices, because they have nothing to do with the performance of the car itself, they are not constrained by the research and development progress of other parts of the vehicle, and they need to develop products that meet their needs in the shortest possible time.
low cost.
The automotive industry is very sensitive to price effects. Price is one of the important factors that determine the competitiveness of automotive products. The selection of appropriate technologies, materials and devices plays an important role in the development of the automotive industry. With the increase in the share of automotive electronic products in the cost of the entire vehicle, it is an extremely critical issue to reduce the cost of these electronic products as much as possible.
Above we discussed some basic needs for electronic product technology in the field of automotive electronics. In addition, automotive electronic products also need to minimize energy consumption and reduce occupied space.
3 Application prospects of reconfigurable computing technology in the field of automotive electronics
In current automotive electronic products, a large number of microprocessors and application specific integrated circuits are used to achieve key functions. The emergence of reconfigurable computing technology provides another efficient and flexible choice for automotive electronics.
Schematic diagram of project innovation cycle and development time in the automotive field
The development of reconfigurable computing technology mainly depends on the development of reconfigurable logic device technology and dynamic reconfiguration technology. With the advancement of semiconductor technology, the current commercial reconfigurable logic devices can already integrate millions of basic logic gate units and various other complex calculation logic on a single chip, and even some high-end devices have been integrated Multiple microprocessor cores further enhance the computing power of the device [5]. This provides basic support for reconfigurable logic devices that were originally used to implement simple glue logic and prototype system design, and can gradually occupy the core position of the computing system. Dynamic reconfiguration is one of the research hotspots of current reconfigurable computing technology. It refers to configuring some resources on reconfigurable logic devices as new functions without affecting the normal operation of the current system, thereby improving resource utilization. Rate and increase system performance. Dynamic reconfiguration is the development direction of reconfigurable technology. At present, it mainly focuses on how to reduce device reconfiguration overhead and optimize resource scheduling.
Compared with traditional automotive electronic products using microprocessors and application specific integrated circuits, automotive electronic products using reconfigurable computing technology have the following advantages:
Reconfigurable computing technology can efficiently implement specific functions.
The reconfigurable logic devices are all hard-wired logic, which changes the function by changing the configuration of the device. Once the configuration information of the device is loaded, the entire system can greatly speed up the realization of functions with the performance of the hardware. The computationally intensive functions in automotive electronics are typical examples such as video processing, whose core algorithm is an arithmetic-intensive signal processing operation on fixed-point data. After research, it is found that these operations are suitable for efficient implementation on reconfigurable logic devices. The use of reconfigurable logic devices to speed up the execution of core algorithms, and the addition of additional microprocessors coupled with it to perform auxiliary functions such as input and output operations, is a good way to construct reconfigurable computing systems. There are already a number of efficient video processing systems that utilize reconfigurable computing technology, and have been widely used in the field of automotive electronics [6].
Reconfigurable computing technology can flexibly meet multiple functional requirements by dynamically changing device configurations.
The dynamic reconfigurable feature enables the same reconfigurable logic device to meet different design requirements, which is beyond the reach of traditional ASIC computing models. Automobile electronic products are different from general electronic products, which are constrained by many factors. For example, the limitations of the car model, the same car with the same basic design will have different models such as economy, standard and luxury. This requires corresponding electronic product support for different models. The cost of designing a dedicated computing core unit and peripheral circuits for each car model is high, and reconfigurable computing technology can eliminate this obstacle. Automotive designers can only develop a prototype system that uses reconfigurable logic devices, and then flexibly configure the reconfigurable logic devices to the corresponding functions according to the requirements of different vehicle models. In addition, due to the lack of standards that have an absolute advantage in the industry, the adoption of technical standards is also a problem that designers must solve. For example, there are multiple standards such as LIN, CAN, and MOST on the current bus. The technical parameters of different standards are very different. In order to avoid conflicts between these bus standards, you can consider using reconfigurable logic devices as Bridge logic between standards.
Reconfigurable computing technology is suitable for applications in harsh working environments.
The current reconfigurable computing technology has withstood the test of many extreme working environments. For example, NASA's "Courage" and "Opportunity" rover have used a lot of reconfigurable logic devices. In automotive applications, temperature will cause the most damage to automotive electronics. The highest node temperature in the industry is 150 degrees Celsius, and the special packaging for reconfigurable logic devices in harsh environments is sufficient to ensure the normal operation of the system in this situation. Another advantage of using reconfigurable logic devices is that they do not require the necessary heat dissipation system of the microprocessor, which greatly reduces the space occupied by electronic products. In addition, the reconfigurable logic device has a large number of redundant reconfigurable logic resources, so that when certain areas of the device are destroyed, the system can use dynamic reconfiguration technology to automatically avoid these areas while using other logic resource combinations around Replace the damaged function of the area.
Reconfigurable computing technology has strong technical support to accelerate product development.
Unlike the design of application specific integrated circuits, reconfigurable computing technology does not require a lot of NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) work. Device manufacturers will cooperate with different reconfigurable logic devices to provide corresponding development tools and processes. At the same time, they will provide a large number of reference designs and IP cores to reduce the designer's repeated work and improve the reliability of the design. There are also many mature simulation tools and verification tools that can be used to ensure the correctness of the design at all stages of the design, reducing the time wasted due to error rework.
The use of reconfigurable computing technology can greatly reduce system costs.
The reduction of system cost is mainly reflected in two parts: one is in the design process and the other is in the running process. The current unit price of reconfigurable logic devices for vehicles has been reduced to a minimum of $ 1.50, and the development cost of using it to implement applications is far lower than that of application specific integrated circuits. The flexibility of the reconfigurable logic device eliminates the need for it to be like an application-specific integrated circuit. A slight modification will cause the entire circuit to be redesigned and fabricated. At the same time, when the system is running, it can be determined that some functions will not be used at the same time, then the designer can consider using dynamic reconfiguration technology to achieve these two functions separately in different demand periods to achieve "one piece of multi-purpose" , Saving resources, space and cost.
It can be seen from the above discussion that applying reconfigurable computing technology to the field of automotive electronics has great advantages and is a practical technical solution. At present, the industry has also noticed the application prospects of reconfigurable computing technology.
4 Problems faced by reconfigurable computing technology in the field of automotive electronics
Although reconfigurable computing technology has made considerable progress in many fields, it still faces many problems when it is specifically applied in the field of automotive electronics. Here are some of the most typical problems:
Reconfigurable logic device selection. Currently, there are several major manufacturers of reconfigurable logic devices:
Xilinx, Actel, Altera and LatTIce have all started to pay attention to the field of automotive electronics and have successively launched products. The hardware structure, processing power and market price of these products are all different. How to choose the right device for the application is a very important issue. Current reconfigurable logic devices are basically based on SRAM, Flash or anti-fuse technology. Each of these three technologies has its advantages. Among them, mainstream SRAM-based devices already have very powerful processing capabilities; Flash-based devices are few but cost-effective; devices based on anti-fuse technology do not have the ability to rebuild multiple times but are reliable Sex is better. Therefore, device selection for different applications needs to be carried out on the basis of being very familiar with the application and device information.
Implementation of applications on reconfigurable logic devices.
Although there are many ways to simplify the development process of applications using reconfigurable computing technology. However, it is still unfamiliar and difficult for most application developers to design applications executed by reconfigurable logic devices using hardware description languages ​​or hardware schematics. In order to eliminate the difficulties encountered by software designers in the hardware implementation of software algorithms, a variety of high-level language hardware description languages ​​have been developed, but these technologies are not yet mature. Various hardware application design software launched by EDA software manufacturers also have some limitations and defects, and they cannot fully exert the power of reconfigurable computing technology. This requires designers of automotive electronic products to master the design ideas of using reconfigurable computing technology and infiltrate them into the product design.
Reliability guarantee for reconfigurable logic devices.
Unlike traditional microprocessor and application specific integrated circuit calculation modes, reconfigurable logic devices change their functions by changing the device configuration. Especially for SRAM-based devices, the configuration information stored on the device controls the hard wiring between the logic cells in the device. Therefore, inputting other configuration information through the configuration port may change or even damage the function of the device, and a similar situation did not occur in the past. In order to prevent these problems, it is necessary to use reconfigurable logic devices based on anti-fuse technology that can only be reconstructed once or use configuration information encryption methods on key electronic equipment.
.. Development and use of dynamic reconfiguration technology. Although the dynamic reconstruction technology has been greatly developed in theory, and many prototype systems have been developed. However, due to technical limitations, there is currently no universal research and development method, and there are still some deficiencies in the technology actually used in the product. This requires collaboration between industry and academia to tackle key applications in the field of automotive electronics, and apply as many mature dynamic reconfiguration technologies as possible to automotive electronics products, bringing advantages such as high efficiency and high resource utilization. At the same time, carry out research on the methodology of dynamic reconstruction technology to provide technical guarantee for the wider application of dynamic reconstruction technology in the field of electronic products.
5 Summary
Automotive electronics has occupied a very important position in the entire automotive industry and has broad market prospects. The development of the automotive electronics industry is a top priority for the development of the automotive industry. Automobile electronic products have many special requirements due to their special fields of application. In contrast, traditional microprocessor and application specific integrated circuit computing models have been unable to meet these needs well. Reconfigurable computing technology makes full use of the reconfigurable characteristics of reconfigurable logic devices, combined with dynamic reconfiguration technology, can efficiently and flexibly realize automotive electronic applications, and has unmatched traditional methods in terms of reliability, development time, and system cost. The advantages. Although there are still some problems in practical applications, it has caused great concern in the industry and academia. We believe that reconfigurable computing technology represents a technological trend in the development of automotive electronics products and will certainly make a big difference in the field of automotive electronics.
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