Toward Flexible and Scalable Electrical/Electronic Architecture for Software-Defined Vehicles

The transition to software-defined vehicles increases software complexity, validation effort, and lifecycle management costs. Reusable software platforms, centralized computing, and scalable architectures help reduce duplicated development work across vehicle programs. By standardizing common software foundations and consolidating computing resources, OEMs can improve software portability, accelerate OTA readiness, and focus engineering resources on differentiated customer experiences. LG Vehicle Solution combines high-performance platforms, zonal architectures, and reusable software frameworks to support this transition.

Modern vehicles must coordinate infotainment, connectivity, cybersecurity, cloud services, and ADAS within a common software environment. Unlike traditional ECU-centric architectures, SDVs require continuous software integration, validation, and updates throughout the vehicle lifecycle. Regulatory requirements and growing software content further increase development complexity, making scalable software platforms increasingly important.

Rising development costs, integration complexity, and regulatory requirements remain major barriers. Developing a centralized computing platform in-house requires substantial investment and deep technical expertise, and some OEMs have reverted to traditional architectures due to cost efficiency. A practical SDV strategy can emphasize software reuse, and scalable platform development rather than abrupt transitions.

Premium vehicles often require advanced ADAS and immersive digital experiences, while volume vehicles place greater emphasis on cost competitiveness and efficiency. A scalable architecture enables automakers to reuse common foundations while adapting performance, features, and cost structures according to individual vehicle requirements.

Consolidating ECUs by functional domain reduces the overall ECU count, and the shift toward centralized computing with zonal architecture builds on this by shortening wiring harnesses, providing a more unified basis for software lifecycle management, and making OTA updates easier. It also creates a stronger foundation for future software-defined vehicle capabilities.

Zonal architectures organize electronics according to physical vehicle location rather than functional domains. This can reduce wiring complexity, support modular vehicle development, simplify electrical integration, and provide an efficient foundation for centralized computing.

Actual results vary by vehicle platform, but zonal architectures are designed to shorten wiring paths and reduce overall harness complexity. Beyond weight reduction, this can improve packaging efficiency, manufacturing simplicity, and serviceability.

LG’s HPC platform is built around physical modularity and kernel-level hardware virtualization. Through modular compute units and zonal gateways, compute capability is decoupled from physical I/O, so vehicle programs are not locked into a specific semiconductor vendor’s roadmap. Technologies such as the Ghost Device chip-to-chip interface allow peripherals connected to one SoC to appear as pseudo-devices on adjacent processors.

Scalable architectures allow common hardware and software assets to be reused across premium and volume vehicle programs. This improves platform consistency, reduces development costs, and accelerates the deployment of new capabilities.

Modern high-performance computing platforms can consolidate multiple vehicle workloads through virtualization, orchestration, and dynamic resource allocation. This enables efficient compute sharing while maintaining operational separation between domains.

Mixed-criticality computing allows safety-critical and non-safety-critical workloads to share common hardware resources. Proper isolation mechanisms help improve resource efficiency without compromising safety objectives.

Virtualization technologies create separate execution environments that isolate safety-critical applications from infotainment and convenience features. This supports hardware consolidation while preserving functional integrity.

Workload orchestration dynamically allocates computing resources according to vehicle conditions and application priorities. It helps maximize platform utilization while ensuring critical workloads receive appropriate resources.

Intelligent scheduling, virtualization, and resource isolation can improve compute utilization while maintaining appropriate safety boundaries. For example, when an emergency event such as hard braking is detected, compute budgets for infotainment can be dynamically restricted and the required resources diverted to safety-critical ADAS functions.

Future vehicles must simultaneously address functional safety and cybersecurity obligations. Architectures designed around isolation, monitoring, and lifecycle security processes can help support standards such as ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434, and UN R155/R156. These certifications increasingly require continuous traceability and validation across an evolving software lifecycle rather than one-time approvals.

Reusable middleware, development frameworks, and common software platforms help reduce redundant engineering work. This can improve productivity and support consistent software deployment across vehicle programs.

Open ecosystems encourage interoperability, software reuse, and collaboration across the automotive value chain. They help reduce fragmentation and accelerate platform innovation.

S-CORE seeks to establish common software foundations for software-defined vehicles. By standardizing non-differentiating foundational automotive software components as open-source code, it aims to reduce duplicated development efforts and improve software reusability. LG Vehicle Solution contributes to S-CORE and leads the PULLPIRI project, which builds on this foundation to provide a vehicle service orchestration framework.

PICCOLO is LG’s lightweight, vehicle-native orchestration platform for mixed-criticality workloads. A hypervisor-based domain isolation separates the safety-critical RTOS domain from the general-purpose Rich OS domain, while a State Manager and Scheduler reallocate resources according to real-time driving conditions. In the event of a fault, low-priority convenience features are degraded and critical safety functions are migrated to an active backup core to help maintain essential vehicle functions.

Orchestrated Intelligence is LG’s vision of an architectural foundation that can safely fuse data from across the vehicle, interpret context, and enable a more adaptive system that responds to occupants’ needs and driving conditions in real time. Orchestration across centralized and zonal controllers is intended to break down isolated sensor and domain silos.