50 Looking at cycle times in vehicle production, it becomes clear that production structures are not always designed to transfer the entire software volume to the control units only during assembly. However, maximum transfer speed alone does not determine the efficiency of a flashing process. Equally important is the question of when, where, and under what conditions software is transferred to the control units. To meet these requirements, the flashing process in production is divided into several steps: off-line flashing and in-line flashing. IT and Automotive Flashing in Production By Mario Borkowski, Senior Sales Manager, Softing Automotive Electronics GmbH When we start our vehicle, we expect everything to work smoothly. The engine runs smoothly, the navigation system shows us the way, and lane-keeping assistance and other driver assistance systems are ready when needed. For these systems to work together reliably, installing the right hardware is not enough. What matters is that the correct software version is installed on every control unit. Control units form a network within the vehicle. This network has evolved fundamentally in recent years. While a distributed architecture with a central gateway is the standard today, domain architectures with centralized functions are already being used in production vehicles. At the same time, the first zonal architectures are entering vehicle development and paving the way for the Software Defined Vehicle . This evolution is changing not only vehicle architecture, but also the requirements for diagnostic and flashing processes. With every new vehicle generation, the volume of software increases significantly. In the future, software packages totaling 60 GB or more per vehicle will be no exception. This makes flashing a key challenge throughout the vehicle lifecycle. While CAN allows transfer rates of only around 23 kB/s, DoIP already achieves around 11 MB/s. These figures are based on measurements under real-world conditions and indicate the order of magnitude of the flash rates that can be achieved realistically. Images: © Softing Automotive Electronics
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