What are functional domains in automotive and their different types?
Overview So, hello guys, and welcome back to the Gettobyte Automotive Technology series of blogs. In today’s blog, we are going to dig into different electrical/electronic sub-systems used in Automotive. The automotive industry is today the sixth largest economy in the world, producing around 70 million cars every year and making an important contribution to government revenues all around the world. Automotive Vehicles are no longer mechanical systems, they are one of the largest consumers of Semiconductor chips like microcontrollers, microprocessors, ASIC’s, Integrated Circuits, embedded hardware, and Software solution around these semiconductor chips.  Infact at a time in a modern automotive vehicle there are more than 1000’s of Integrated Circuits and more then 1 lakh lines of code running in vehicles. Indeed, since then, the sector of embedded electronics, and more precisely embedded software, has been increasing at an annual rate of 10% in automotive industry. Electronic technology has made great strides and nowadays the quality of electronic components—performance, robustness, and reliability—enables use of them even for critical systems. At the same time, the decreasing cost of electronic technology allows them to be used to support any function in a car. Furthermore, in the last decade, several automotive-embedded networks such as local interconnect networks (LIN), Controlled Area Network (CAN), TTP (Time-Triggered Protocol), FlexRay and Ethernet were developed. Multimedia and telematic applications in cars are increasing rapidly due to consumer pressure; a vehicle currently includes electronic equipment like hand-free phones, audio/radio devices, and navigation systems. For the passengers, a lot of entertainment devices, such as video equipment and communication with the outside world are also available. These kinds of applications have little to do with the vehicle’s operation itself; nevertheless, they increase significantly as part of the software included in a car. Examples of these facts: Volkswagen Phaeton electronic sub-systems In 2004, the embedded electronic system of a Volkswagen Phaeton was composed of more than 10,000 electrical devices, 61 microprocessors, 3 controller area networks (CAN) that support the exchanges of 2500 pieces of data, several subnetworks, and one multimedia bus. In the Volvo S, inter-car network support the communication between the microprocessors controlling the mirrors and controlling the doors, for example, the position of the mirrors is automatically controlled according to the sense of the near-by vehicle and the volume of the radio is adjusted to the vehicle speed, information provided, by the antilock braking system (ABS) controller. Volvo S Electronic Sub-System In a recent Cadillac, when an accident causes an airbag to inflate, its microcontroller emits a signal to the embedded global positioning system (GPS) receiver that then communicates with the cell phone, making it possible to give the vehicle’s position to the rescue service. These are just a few examples, but there are many more that could illustrate this very large growth of embedded electronic systems in modern vehicles. Now in This blog, we are going to dip deeper into these electronics sub-systems in an automotive vehicle. What are functional domains in Automotive? To get a hierarchical understanding of the electronics used in a car, one can divide the car into different parts. These parts are basically in the car termed as Domains. According to the European ITEA EAST-EEA project, a domain is defined as, a sphere of knowledge, influence, and activity in which one or more systems are to be dealt with (e.g., are to be built). The term domain can be used to group mechanical and electronic systems. A vehicle domain describes the grouping of systems and functions in a vehicle that can be assigned to individual areas. Historically, there are 5 domains in automotive: Powertrain DomainPowertrain: is related to the system that participates in the longitudinal propulsion of the vehicle, including engine, transmission, and all subsidiary components.Click HereChassis DomainChassis: The chassis domain refers to the four wheels and their relative position and movement in this domain, the systems are mainly steering and braking.Click HereBody DomainBody Domain: includes the entities that do not belong to the vehicle dynamics, but to the car users such as Airbags, wipers, lighting, window lifter, air conditioning, seat equipment, etcClick HereHMI DomainHMI Domain: includes the equipment allowing information exchange between electronic systems and drivers (displays and switches).Click HereTelematic DomainTelematic Domain: is related to components allowing information exchange between the vehicle and the outside world (radio, navigation system, Internet access, payment).Click Here Previous slide Next slide From one domain to another, electronic systems often have very different features. For example, the powertrain and chassis domains both exhibit hard real-time constraints and a need for high computation power. The telematic domain presents requirements for high data throughput. However, the hardware architecture in the chassis domain is more widely distributed in the vehicle. From this standpoint, the technological solutions in each domain used are very different, for example, the communication networks, the design techniques, and the verification of the embedded software are different for each domain. These 5 domains, cover all the electronic/electrical sub-systems of the car. You can think of any sub-system that you can think of, and it will fall in one of the above domains specified. Let’s just deep dive into each of these domains to understand which electrical sub-systems come in which domain. Different types of functional domain in Automotive To understand each of the domains, we will broadly be going to answer 3 questions: What parts of the vehicle fall into the corresponding domain? Examples of Automotive sub-systems for that corresponding domain. Sensors/Actuators/Modules used in that corresponding domain. PowerTrain Domain: Parts of the vehicle fall into Powertrain domain Examples of Powertrain domain Parts of the vehicle fall into Powertrain domain This domain represents the system that controls the engine, such as: A) According to requests from the driver: → Speeding Up and Slowing Down as transmitted by the throttle position sensor or brake pedal. B) And from other parts of the embedded system such as: → Climate control (natural factors like air current temperature, oxygen level and environment annoyances such as exhaust pollution, noise and etc) and Electronic Stability Program (ESP):
