Automotive Ethernet is part of the IEEE Ethernet Standards and therefore specified in the IEEE 802.3 standard family.
Here’s an overview of the Automotive Ethernet related standards from IEEE 802.3.
10BASE-T1S
- Standard: IEEE 802.3cg
- Data Rate: 10 MBit/s
10BASE-T1S is the Automotive Ethernet Standard with the lowest data rate and cheapest connection nodes. Due to the multi drop topology option, it intends to replace CAN, CAN-FD and Flexray in modern cars. CAN and Flexray are mostly used for the Powertrain, Chassis and Body Control Communication.
It is expected the data rates in these domains are only growing slowly and the communication infrastructure is driven more by communication costs than by performance.
100BASE-T1
- Standard: IEEE 802.3bw
- Data rate: 100 MBit/s
The 100BASE-T1 standard will be the future for connecting surrounding field sensors like laser scanners radar and ultrasonic sensors. Even if the data rate is not high enough to transfer sensor raw data it is the best fit for some sensor based pre processing and aggregation succeeded by the data transfer to a centralized sensor data fusion.
One additional cost advantage of the 100BASE-T1 standard is the option to use unshielded Twisted Pair Cable. The costs are much lower than for shielded cable that is needed for the 1000BASE-T1 Standard and everything above.
1000BASE-T1
- Standard: IEEE 802.3bp
- Data Rate: 1000 MBit/s
Like the 100BASE-T1 standard the 1000BASE-T1 Standard will be mainly used to connect surrounding field sensors but can also act as the backbone to connect zone and central computers and network attached storages.
The big disadvantage of the 1000BASE-T1 Standard is the need of shielded Twisted Pair Cable. It makes the usage of the 1000BASE-T1 communication more expensive than the usage of the 100BASE-T1 standard.
MultiGBASE-T1
- Standard: IEEE 802.3ch
- Data Rate: 2.5 GBit/s, 5 GBit/s und 10 GBit/s
The MULTIGBASE-T1 standard intends to be the main backbone standard for Automotive Ethernet. The protocol defines 3 different data rates using the same protocol by just changing the clock cycle.
The demand for MultiGBASE-T1 is high, especially for data driven systems like the Autonomous Driving, but the chip costs are much higher than for the other Automotive Ethernet standards. The costs are driven by complex development projects and much bigger chip area needs for the Physical Layer Chip. So OEM will think twice how many MultiGBASE-T1 ports they will integrate
The Automotive Ethernet Blog 