Biggest myth in automotive: Ethernet won't work for ADAS

By videantis GmbH

July 22, 2016

There are several digital data communication standards being used in the car: CAN, FlexRay, MOST, and LVDS. Each electronic component in the car typically uses its own dedicated wiring, making this cabling complex. The resulting wiring harness is very costly, with only the engine and chassis being more expensive. In addition, the wire harness is heavy and very labour-intensive to manufacture. Replacing traditional wiring with Automotive Ethernet has many advantages. A joint study by Broadcom and Bosch estimated that using “unshielded twisted pair cable to deliver data at a rate of 100Mbps, along with smaller and more compact connectors can reduce connectivity cost up to 80 percent and cabling weight up to 30 percent.” The Automotive Ethernet: An Overview report by Ixia gives a good introduction and overview of the technology.

One key application of using Ethernet in the car is to connect all the cameras to the head unit, displays, and other electronic control units in the car. There’s many cameras in the car for rear view, surround view, mirror replacement, driver monitoring and front view. If you want to know more about what functions these cameras are performing, you can read a previous blog of ours. Most of these cameras today are connected by LVDS, which requires expensive shielded cabling and only provides point-to-point connections.

There are a few myths surrounding Ethernet and ADAS that are hurting adoption though. Here are three of them that we ran across.

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