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“The feature content of new cars is increasing on a daily basis” Henrich Hasselbacher, Lear Corp.
More than ever before, automotive electronics plays a major role in the automobile. Today, in-vehicle electronics are often times the determining factor in the success of an automobile’s coming to the market.
The quest for the improved fuel efficiency, road safety and infotainment devices has ensured that the number of electronic devices keeps increasing. The average new vehicle is now fitted with between 80 to 150 electromagnetic devices, of which 20 to 50 are electronic motors and between 60 - 100 are electronic control units, also called ECUs. These ECUs manage each up to 165 small functionalities inside the car. Figure #1 shows a typical car with its used electrical - electronical components.
As can be seen, the car of today and tomorrow is a moving networked computing platform. The tasks of providing power to, and controlling signals to and from, this plethora of devices has demanded multiplexing solutions that are far more sophisticated than the traditional wiring harness.
 Figure 1: Vehicle Model with electrical components The last decade has seen the rise of the interconnecting network architecture in automobiles, otherwise called, in-vehicle networking. Figure #2 shows a typical in vehicle network, representing the backbone of the vehicle architecture.
 Figure 2: Vehicle Network, the backspin of the vehicle E/E architecture. In-vehicle networks play a crucial role of connecting and facilitating communication between the expanding arrays of individual electronic components in a car. The increasing number and complexity of electronic components coupled with the demand for a robust precise multiplexing solution is creating technological barriers that the automobile OEM and Tier-1s must surmount for production of an automobile. The electrical and electronic architecture itself and this by far does not mean the individual enabling technologies, starts to become a not well known, young but cost, time to market, product success as life critical design decision and manageability challenge of respected and well estimated importance but not well known and elaborated challenge.
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