Automotive Gateway Industry Research: Tenfold Improvement in Gateway Performance Breaks the Bottleneck of Software-defined Vehicles.

Automotive gateway chip is actually a field with scarcely ever changes in a long period of time, but since 2020, many chip vendors have rolled out new solutions for automotive gateways.

In early 2020, NXP Semiconductors unveiled its new S32G vehicle gateway processor which plays a key part in service-oriented gateways and helps OEMs be the data-driven service providers with expanded business opportunities.

In January 2020, Texas Instruments (TI) introduced the new Jacinto? 7 processor platform on which DRA829V processor is available for gateway systems.

In March 2020, ST released the modular Smart-Gateway Platform (SGP) built on gigabit Ethernet communication between the secure and ASIL-B Telemaco3P microprocessor (MPU) and the ASIL-D SPC58/Chorus microcontroller (MCU) to provide a valuable development tool for prototyping automotive Smart-Gateway and Domain-Controller applications.

NXP believes that a gateway is a central hub that securely and reliably interconnects and processes data across heterogeneous vehicle networks. It provides physical isolation and protocol translation to route data between functional domains (powertrain, chassis and safety, body control, infotainment, telematics, ADAS) that share data to enable new features. The hardware-centric model of traditional gateways are turning to be a software-based and service-oriented model to support over-the-air (OTA) updates and vehicle analytics with secure communications to OEM servers (cloud), allowing to make adjustments according to the user’s preferences, apply safety updates, address warranty and repair problems, address security vulnerabilities, and enable new features that improve the user experience.

Service-oriented gateways enriches functionality of traditional gateways, getting data processing and network transmission improved by at least ten times, offering new services, integrating ECUs to be responsive to vehicle data surge. Software-defined cars, already a consensus of the industry, require changes in the automotive system architecture, SOA (service-oriented architecture), powerful gateways and domain controllers. To follow this trend, chip giants have launched smart gateways ten times better than previous products.

According to YummyCookiePuff, a WeChat public account, the chips with enhanced capabilities and access to vehicle data make gateway controllers ideal as automotive data servers. In the vehicle design of the domain-based architecture, different domain controllers register services, discover services and use services from gateways. Domain controllers and service-oriented gateways constitute a distributed system inside the vehicle. Automotive data servers with data and computing power are no longer simple route forwarders, not only providing public data storage and sharing services for vehicles but generating new data (such as cross-domain fusion data) from data processing to serve each domain upon demand. Part of telematics data services originally done over the cloud can also be deployed in vehicles, delivering real-time services for automotive HMI and autonomous driving. The design driven by signals and control is being replaced by the data- and service-driven modern vehicle E/E architecture design.

Smart gateways exist in many forms: stand alone, integrated with T-BOX, integrated with domain controllers, etc. Now, a dozen vendors offer stand-alone gateways.

Gateways needs developing in harness with software integrated such as network security and OTA. Powerful Tier1 suppliers address software problems by independent R&D and acquisitions, for instance, Continental offers cyber security solutions from Argus and Elektrobit for all connected vehicle electronics (Argus is part of Continental’s subsidiary Elektrobit). However, less competitive Tier1 suppliers team up with third-party cybersecurity companies. Given the importance of gateways, some automakers work directly with software providers, e.g., GAC Motor partners with Tata Elxsi to develop smart gateway modules.