The 1000BASE-RHC Optical Physical Layer adds a robust and EMC-safe network interface to the communication gateway ECU
www.eenewsautomotive.com, May. 03, 2022 –
Vehicle computers not only have to offer plenty of computing power, but also have to be able to communicate with high bandwidth and low latency. Ideally, this is done via broadband fibre optic cables. The electronics company Renesas meets this requirement by integrating an optical interface into its communication gateway control unit VC4. This interface is controlled by a chip from the Spanish gigabit fibre optics expert KDPOF.
The VC4's data communication runs via the KD1053 PHY IC and the integrated KD9351 FOT (fibre optic transceiver) from KDPOF. "The VC4 is the first time we have integrated an optical Ethernet interface into our automotive evaluation boards," explains Tobias Belitz, Principal Engineer at Renesas. "KDPOF provided us with its 1000BASE RH transceiver KD1053 and KD9351 FOT according to IEEE 802.3bv, which also cover the wide temperature range we are targeting."
The four megatrends of autonomous driving, connected vehicles, electromobility and shared mobility mean that E/E architecture is evolving from domain-based to zonal architecture to meet the increasing complexity and computing power requirements of the next generation of vehicles. With the VC4 communication gateway ECU, Renesas offers its automotive customers a universal development platform based on the R-Car-S4 system-on-module.