On April 17, Volkswagen Group announced that it will jointly develop the CEA electronic and electrical architecture with Xpeng Motors, and achieve rapid catch-up in the electronic and electrical architecture through the empowerment of Chinese car companies.
From distributed to domain control to central computing, in the past 10 years, the automotive electronic and electrical architecture has undergone a dramatic change that has not been seen in the past 50 years.
Under the wave of automotive intelligence, the concise formula of "software-defined vehicle = chip + data-driven + central computing architecture + basic software platform + application software" is the general consensus of the industry on "software-defined vehicles".
Among them, the electronic and electrical architecture is considered to be the "nervous system" of the car, connecting all parts of the vehicle and supporting the realization of intelligent functions.
In 2017, Tesla took the lead in realizing the domain integration of its electrical architecture, and its ahead of the times electrical architecture is considered to be one of the important factors for Tesla's leading intelligent technology. Thanks to the first-mover advantage in intelligent new energy vehicles and the high requirements of Chinese users for intelligence, Chinese car companies in the involution have rapidly iterated in electronic and electrical institutions in recent years, and have achieved a leading position in this field for overseas car companies.
In July 2023, Leapmotor launched the four-leaf clover electronic and electrical architecture, which is the first to realize the integrated control of cabin, driving, driving and parking, and the current four-leaf clover architecture has been implemented on the Leapmotor C10, the all-new C11, and the all-new C01.
"The launch of the Clover central integrated electronic and electrical architecture benefits from Leapmotor's in-depth self-research at the cockpit, intelligent driving, power, and body controller levels, realizing the integration of four domains, and the central supercomputing platform highly integrates 15 functional modules, supports multi-system integration, and maximizes the performance of the core chip. Zhu Jiangming, founder and chairman of Leapmotor, said in an interview. In addition, Dongfeng Lantu, GAC Aion and other car companies have also launched their central integrated electronic and electrical architecture.
However, it should be pointed out that in the technological evolution from domain control to central integration, Chinese car companies that have taken the lead in the field of intelligence have begun different explorations at the technological frontier of automotive electronic and electrical architecture.
Why central computing architecture is the cornerstone technology of smart cars
Electronic and electrical architecture, abbreviated as E/E architecture, also known as EEA (Electrical & Electronic Architecture), is the integration of electronic and electrical related functional solutions for the whole vehicle. The word Architecture originally meant architecture or architecture, and was later abstracted into the architect who built the framework.
The development of E/E architecture is similar to building a house, building a house needs to define the functions of each room, and the E/E architecture also needs to define the functional performance and implementation scheme of each functional domain, such as lighting function, power function, and auxiliary driving function; building a house needs to define the location of gas paths, water channels, doors and windows, and E/E architecture also needs to define the communication form, power supply circuit, and line connection of the whole vehicle; to build a house, it is necessary to wiring and moving, and the E/E architecture also needs to integrate various functions into the whole vehicle; finally the house will be accepted by the customer, E/ The E-architecture will also be repeatedly verified by engineers before the car is delivered to the customer.
Before the rise of smart electric vehicles, hundreds of ECUs on the car independently controlled different functions, forming a distributed automotive electronic and electrical architecture. This distributed architecture creates considerable redundancy at the vehicle level, with software updates for traditional cars being almost synchronized with the vehicle lifecycle, greatly impacting the user experience.
However, in the era of intelligent electric vehicles, more intelligent functions make it difficult for MCUs with low computing power to withstand them, and at the same time, the continuous iteration ability brought by OTA technology also makes it difficult for the distributed architecture to cope with each other. In addition, complex wiring harness connections are required between the various module units of the distributed architecture, and the wiring harness of several kilometers is one of the major enemies of automotive lightweighting.
As a result, domain-focused electrical architectures emerged. With the support of this technology, not only the amount of redundant software development can be greatly reduced, but also a lot of controllers can be streamlined and optimized, such as traditional electric tailgate controllers, window anti-pinch controllers, door controllers, etc., which will bring about cost and weight reduction.
However, with the evolution of automotive intelligence to the deep-water area, car companies have begun to integrate multiple functional domains on the vehicle, and expect to eventually realize the central computing electronic and electrical architecture.
In the case of more and more in-depth intelligence, the number of automotive ECUs and the demand for ECU computing power have shown explosive growth, especially the core product strength that users pay attention to, such as intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit, and the requirements for computing power have also exploded. Earlier, most car companies began to be unable to integrate the "functional domain" based on functional modules, and the design of wiring harnesses, layouts, installations, brackets and other designs had to be reshuffled, and the cost of mechanical structures was very staggering.
In addition, different functional domains are independent, and there are still problems such as waste of computing power, low internal communication efficiency, and cumbersome software and hardware upgrades.
The shift to central computing in the next generation of E/E architectures of car companies is driven by two directions: cost reduction and efficiency improvement. In terms of cost reduction, the multi-chip solution to the single-chip solution can not only save chips, but also simplify power management, communication needs, and reduce wiring harness costs. In terms of efficiency enhancement, through cross-domain integration and architecture unification, the intelligent experience can be improved, and it is more convenient to support personalized definition, subscription services, intimate services, and vehicle OTA, bringing consumers into the era of software-defined vehicles.
In recent years, the domestic electronic and electrical architecture has developed rapidly, from the Xpeng XEEA architecture to the VOYAH automotive ESSA+SOA intelligent electric bionic body, all of which have realized the central computing architecture of cross-domain integration. The "four-leaf clover" central integrated electronic and electrical architecture launched by Leapmotor realizes the integration of one SOC and one MCU in the cockpit domain, intelligent driving domain, power domain, and body domain, bringing high reliability, fast communication, and low latency experience to the whole vehicle, and realizing non-inductive online OTA upgrade capabilities.
Different options in the same direction
However, it should be pointed out that although Chinese car companies are competing to lay out the central computing architecture, there are still big differences in the technical direction of the details of each car company.
In the CEA architecture recently cooperated by Xpeng and Volkswagen, a combination of a central computing unit and three zone controllers is adopted. From a technical point of view, this layout is relatively advanced, and the three zone controllers can provide more computing power. The Leap Clover adopts the design concept of One Box, and the computing requirements of the cockpit domain, intelligent driving domain, power domain, and body domain are all integrated into the central computing unit, with a higher degree of integration.
"In 2017, the industry put forward a concept similar to the CEA architecture layout, but until now, most of the car companies that have adopted this technical route have given up. Although the technology is relatively advanced, a central computing unit plus multiple regional controllers will have the disadvantage of high latency, and multiple high-computing power chips will also bring the problem of high cost. An engineer from a new energy vehicle company said.
In the layout of central computing and multiple regional controllers, information such as sensors and actuators need to be transmitted to the regional controller first, and then to the central computing unit, and the delay is difficult to solve under multiple transmission. In order to reduce latency, car companies often use faster bus forms such as Ethernet for data transmission, but this will also greatly increase the cost, and the high technical difficulty and high cost make this type of layout less practical, even if Volkswagen and Xpeng are combined, it will take 2026 to mass production.
The four-leaf clover architecture has now realized a SOC chip + an MCU to realize the vehicle control function, and its 8295 chip can realize multiple functions such as intelligent cockpit, part of intelligent driving, audio, and surround view, which greatly reduces the demand for high-computing power SOC. At the same time, because the information is centrally transmitted to the central computing unit, the complexity of information transmission is reduced, and this type of architecture can further reduce costs by using a CAN bus with high reliability and relatively low cost in some functional domains.
At the same time, due to the simpler topping structure, the four-leaf clover architecture technical route can effectively shorten the cost and weight reduction of the wiring harness in the car. It is reported that the length of the vehicle wiring harness under the four-leaf clover architecture has been shortened to 1,500 meters, which is one-third to one-quarter of the traditional car, and with the further upgrading and iteration of the architecture, this length is expected to be significantly reduced.
From the perspective of future trends, car companies are committed to realizing One Box/One Board/One Chip, which is simply a box with two boards, a board with two chips, and a board with one chip. The real "central computing unit" is One Chip, that is, the intelligent driving domain and the intelligent cabin domain run simultaneously on a single SoC chip.
With the release of high-computing power chips such as NVIDIA Thor and Qualcomm Flex, many car companies have planned to adopt single-chip central computing solutions. Prior to this, LeapRun had already implemented the architecture of a single central computing unit.
At a time when most car companies are transforming to full-stack self-development and intend to control most of the software and hardware design, it is not easy to transform from a distributed architecture to a central computing architecture. For traditional car companies that were good at mechanical design and integration of supplier resources in the past, software and chips are the shortcomings that need to be accelerated and strengthened, and in the era of central computing architecture, it is extremely important for the in-depth development of chips and software.
Taking Leap as an example, Leap has previously released its self-developed intelligent driving assistance chip Lingxin No. 1, and has excavated new functions of DSP sound on the previous 8155 chip, which surprised chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and NXP. On the four-leaf clover, the Qualcomm 8295 chip, which is used as an intelligent cockpit chip by most car companies, has been developed with a variety of functions such as intelligent driving, intelligent cabin and DSP.
Behind these achievements is Leaprun's deep technical strength in chips, software and other capabilities. Zhu Jiangming, the founder of Leaprun, has been dealing with electronics since the beginning of his business, and he has also paid great attention to electronics-related capabilities in the development process of Leaprun. Zhu Jiangming has repeatedly said in public that as long as it is related to electricity, Leaprun will insist on self-development.
The ability to develop chips and software is an important reason and foundation for Leapmotor to take the lead in realizing central computing.
But it is undeniable that the CEA architecture of Xpeng and Volkswagen has its unique technological advancement, and the layout of "strengthening the brain (central computing unit) + strong limbs (multiple domain controllers)" can greatly improve the performance of the vehicle, although there are still many technical difficulties in this layout, but it is difficult for us to deny whether this architecture has the possibility of success in the future.
The four-leaf clover layout, which uses a strong brain (central computing unit) and weak limbs, has the advantage of better cost, lower latency and lower cost. Compared to CEA-style solutions that focus on high performance, the four-leaf clover layout is more pragmatic and achievable, allowing users to enjoy the superior experience of advanced technology today. In the face of the demand for more functions and computing power of future automobiles, the four-leaf clover architecture can also expand its capabilities by adding computing power units.
At the moment of rapid iteration and development of intelligent electric vehicles, we cannot arbitrarily determine which technical route will be the final solution, but for car companies, in the chaotic period of the technical route, they need to insist on the investment and construction of core technologies and key capabilities, which can help enterprises to be invincible.