The amount of pressure to reduce the weight of wiring is extreme in the migration to Zonal Architectures and Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV). It has caused a significant architectural change that has concentrated high-speed Automotive Ethernet backbones as a form of consolidation in order to support both non-critical and infotainment data and safety-critical ADAS traffic.

This is on paper, an efficiency victory. It is a high stakes trade off in the lab that puts Quality of Service (QoS) and system isolation to the test.

Convenience vs Determinism

The key issue facing architects of the modern automotive is ensuring that the failure in one non-critical system starts to bleed into a safety-critical one.

• The Intent – Use one and high-speed 100BASE-T1 bus and manage both certainly the streams of Spotify and the alarm in the emergency braking car.
• Risk – When the PTP (Precision Time Protocol) synchronization fails or in case of a burst of infotainment traffic leading to overflow of a buffer, the determinism of the safety-critical system is lost.

The Reality of Engineering – The Isolation Is Not Easy

Hardware failure is not the most dangerous type of crash, it is Priority Inversion.

• We have seen the situation when a basic door controller on a CAN-FD bus has begun generating Error Frames because the checksum in its response matched a mismatch. This may take up the processing bandwidth of the Gateway ECU causing the delay of important safety packets.
• A crashing information entertainment system is an inconvenience. The infotainment system with a delay in the backup camera screen feed is a regulatory breach according to the ISO 26262.

Visibility is the Antidote

In Prodigy Technovations, we think that you are not supposed to make any guess on whether or not your safety-related traffic is secure. These architectural boundaries are tested by our Automotive Suite. 

• Zero latency passive Tapping – The PGY-100BASE-T1-PA is based on passive tap solution. This guarantee the ground truth of the bus timing without necessarily introducing to the network by the analyzer an extra microsecond of latency.
• Multi-Bus Simultaneous Correlation – CAN-FD, LIN and Ethernet can all be checked using the PGY-LA-EMBD at the same time. This will enable you to observe what point on a slow bus causes a glitch on the high speed backbone resulting in a timeout.
• High-Resolution Timing High 1GS/s timing – We assist you in capturing the noise spikes of 5ns that are absolutely impossible to record using a standard software.

Good engineering is concerned with fewer mistakes. Do not turn a compacted architecture into a point of destruction.