Abstract
The current electronics arrangement in a car clusters up to 80 mono-functional electronic control units (ECUs) in the luxury class from different vendors which are partially networked. The situation causes remarkable problems in logistics, costs, power consumption and mounting space. It is also very hard to fulfill additional end-customer requirements for more comfort, safety and security, individualization, access to new media, only to mention a few of them. Therefore, it is obvious to re-think the situation to find a new electronics architecture which allows to overcome all the problems simultaneously. But, different to many other electronic systems, this structure has to provide certain qualities in reliability, safety and security and to integrate functionalities of different quality requirements regarding those points.
If the resulting new structure is requested to fulfill all requirements simultaneously in a proven way a systematic forward engineering method must be applied for design purposes. The Product Line Approach (PLA) delivers such a systematic forward engineering method to decompose car electronics into com-ponents on different levels system, software, hardware. The decomposition on the level system is considered in more detail with the following results: a new system architecture for automotive electronics should be a client/server architecture which is as much centralized as possible because of cost reasons. This rule of thumb will be spoiled to some extend by a subsequent reliability design which forces decentrally located devices (thin clients) for real-time and safety critical functions like power train control, electric seat adjustments and few others. The rule as much centralized as possible will be followed in a server structure which has access to all thin clients via a high-reliable bus structure. The bus structure itself can be segmented due to requirements from the assembly line. Reflecting the requirements scal-ability, update ability and upgrade ability an assembly rule on the basis of a Reference Architecture has to be specified as an additional commercial view on the decomposed system.