6. Architectures for autonomous vehicles

With the development of ADAS and autonomous vehicles, on-board electronics and computing account for over 30% of a vehicle's total cost. The key functions mentioned in the previous section are supported by components implemented in hardware and/or software. The way these components are organized together constitutes the vehicle's electronic architecture.

The single ECU of the 1990s has now been replaced by a multitude of electronic control units (ECUs) linked together by a variety of dedicated IT networks: CAN or Flexray bus for inter-ECU data exchange, LIN bus for the terminal link between ECU and certain types of sensor, MOST bus for multimedia applications, and so on.

If Donal Knuth, one of the fathers of modern computing, was able to speak of the art of programming computers (The Art of Computer Programming), we can safely evoke the...