Future E / E - Architectures in the Safety Domain

The number of functionalities, sensors and control units in modern vehicles is increasing permanently. In spite of this, the OEMs aim to minimize these numbers to reduce complexity, effort and cost. Thus it is very important to find the most suitable E/E-architecture jointly with the OEM in order to cope with these challenges. Furthermore, the repartitioning of content in the safety domain offers great opportunities for the OEM. First of all, it can reduce the overall costs, since the trend towards increasing active and passive safety systems offers synergies of components and functions: Driven by legislation, the installation rates of safety features like ESP® will rise significantly in some regions. Together with the fact that airbag systems in the triad markets have a take rate of almost 100% it is clear that there will be high potential in developing cost effective E/E-architectures. Consequently two main steps are necessary to cope with these challenges: The first step is finding a suitable integration concept for inertial sensors on the vehicle architecture level. The second step is cost optimization by using maximum synergies or high-integration concepts. Beyond cost reduction, the current functionality can be improved since the inertial sensors are directly connected on the same PCB-board with the airbag-algorithm controller in some integration concepts. This gives the possibility to feed the airbag-algorithm with inertial sensor data like for example the yaw rate. This yaw rate can be used in a yaw rate based airbag algorithm to further improve the performance. This paper gives an overview about the architectures and functions, discusses the pros and cons of the different concepts and gives an outlook for future systems.