Page 13 - Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (January 2020)

Emerging Technologies

The industry’s
• Abstracting software from hardware means decou- move to pur-
pling software development from the underlying pose-engineered EV
ECU or component development. DeVos admits platforms such as Ford’s 2021 Mustang
that today it is a massively complex task in getting Mach-e (shown) works in favor of the
everything to work properly. Proof of that came Ford trend to the new AV architectures.
in 2014, the first year that warranty costs for
software at the OEMs became greater than those for And that’s not how servers operate, DeVos said.
hardware. The situation will only worsen as today’s They abstract compute from the I/O. “All the I/O comes
distributed architectures proliferate, according to in standard format to that server so it’s managed very
DeVos. carefully,” he said. “And that’s the third important point:
enabling the ‘serverization’ of the platform.” This involves
• Separating I/O from computing—with all the aggregating compute into several modules that support
sensors, actuators and data that’s flowing around all the features of the vehicle and doing it more effectively.
the vehicle, with hard connections back to each “Essentially, what we want to do is make the
of the compute platforms, changing those sensors compute agnostic and independent from all those
and actuators at new-model time requires changing sensors and actuation,” DeVos explained. “For us it’s
everything—re-architecting the compute and not reinventing the wheel; it’s applying this separation
sensor interfaces. to the automotive space.” ■

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