Evaluation of a high-throughput communication link for future automotive ADAS controllers

Abstract

The trend toward further integration of automotive electronic control units functionality into domain control units as well as the rise of computing-intensive driver assistance systems has led to a demand for high-performance automotive computation platforms. These platforms have to fulfill stringent safety requirements. One promising approach is the use of performance computation units in combination with safety controllers in a single control unit. Such systems require adequate communication links between the computation units. While Ethernet is widely used, a high-speed serial link communication protocol supported by an Infineon AURIX safety controller appears to be a promising alternative. In this paper, a high-speed serial link IP core is presented, which enables this type of high-speed serial link communication interface for field-programmable gate array–based computing units. In our test setup, the IP core was implemented in a high-performance Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+, which communicated with an Infineon AURIX via high-speed serial link and Ethernet. The first bandwidth measurements demonstrated that high-speed serial link is an interesting candidate for inter-chip communication, resulting in bandwidths reaching up to 127 Mbit/s using stream transmissions.