With the introduction of the new GreenBox 3 real-time development platform, NXP offers a game-changing platform that promotes ECU consolidation for enabling the future of automotive electrification. In this post, we will explore a consolidated ECU demo created around the GreenBox 3 and explain what advantages the GreenBox 3 offers for each of these use cases and why you may want to consider an ECU consolidated design.

The race is on

The automotive industry is being revolutionized by innovations in efficient energy management, new vehicle architectures and software-defined vehicles (SDVs).  Automakers are racing to develop new solutions, taking advantage of these paradigm shifts in the market to establish themselves as innovators and to secure competitive positioning for their products.   

Market adoption of electrified vehicles is ramping quickly, propelled by government legislation for improved efficiency and reduced carbon emissions.  Vehicle networks have become increasingly complex, and manufacturers are recognizing significant opportunities to reduce cost, vehicle weight and development cycle times by moving to domain and zonal architectures that consolidate functions into fewer electronic control units with increased processing power.  Software-defined vehicles, which take full advantage of these new vehicle architectures, will provide life-long upgrade possibilities, resulting in vehicles that improve in performance over their lifetime and enable new revenue streams for vehicle manufacturers. 

The new S32Z and S32E automotive real-time processor families supercharge real-time vehicle compute and control applications. This article highlights how the complementary S32G vehicle network processor for service-oriented gateways, combined with the S32Z and S32E real-time processor can enable new automotive applications. Combining real-time compute with secure cloud connectivity supports advanced sensing, processing and control applications that can adapt with the life of your vehicle.

Vehicle electrical architectures are going through a transformation to achieve the consumers demand for driver assistance, electrification and service functions.  To support modern software-defined vehicles and reduce the cost of the vehicle network, and the associated wiring harness, it is being transitioned to a domain and zonal architectures (or a combination of them). While this evolution helps address the software and cost challenges, it brings other challenges, such as how to partition safety critical real time control operations, like vehicle propulsion.  

As automotive manufacturers are modernizing their vehicle networks, they are increasingly integrating related functions into a single ECU. Choosing a processor for these new ECUs is a critical task, which NXP makes easier with the new S32Z/E Real-Time Processor families

The disruptive technologies of multi-gigabit Automotive Ethernet, IEEE time-sensitive networking (TSN) protocols and automotive cloud-native DevOps are coming together to enable the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV). NXP is at the leading edge of these technology trends and recently announced the S32Z and S32E real-time processors families. 

This article lays out some of the progress on the disruptive technology front and explains how NXP plays a critical role with the launch of the S32 real-time processors by enabling the integration of vehicle-wide, real-time functions and supporting new vehicle architectures involving central compute, domain control and the zonal edge.