Industry Expert Blogs

From seatbelts and antilock brakes to airbags and electronic stability control, the automotive industry has introduced numerous safety innovations over the decades to reduce accidents and save lives.

With vehicles becoming more connected and automated, the concept of safety is now expanding beyond physical safeguards to include digital protections. After all, a car that is vulnerable to hacking can potentially be compromised, posing significant risks to drivers, passengers, and others on the road.

As a result, data security is becoming an increasingly critical component of automotive safety.

The evolution of connected and automated vehicles

Modern vehicles are equipped with a vast array of digital components — including driver assistance systems, mechanical control units, environmental sensors, connectivity modules, and infotainment units — and some contain more than 100 million lines of code.

All of these components and the software within them must work in concert to deliver optimal vehicle performance, user experience, and safety. This requires dramatically higher bandwidth and lower latency data transfer than legacy communication protocols can deliver.

Fortunately, newer technology standards like Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) are being widely adopted by automotive manufacturers and their technology suppliers. Supporting data transport for high-resolution sensing, heterogeneous computing, and 360-degree vehicle perception, PCIe has become an important enabler in the evolution of connected and automated vehicles.

As with any advanced technology, security must be built into — and not bolted onto — PCIe-based systems and components. And that requires standard-compliant tools and IP that can be leveraged in the earliest stages of design and development.

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