Supply Line Embedded Communication in Automotive Sensor/Actuator Networks

In recent car developments, the proliferation of Communication systems with several electronics nodes results in increased cost, complexity, and wire harness weight. Such nodes are usually connected by several wires, like a differential communication bus, power supply lines, and possibly addressing lines. In this paper, novel transmitter designs for reducing the amount of interconnects between the nodes are proposed, exploting communication on the power lines, occupying unused parts of the spectrum. Besides the cost-saving, such methods reduce the automotive harness complexity and lead to more flexible solutions, lowering the demand for raw material and consequently reduced emissions during the production process. However, this requires adding specific sections to apply communication to the power line in each IC devices controlling the nodes. In this paper, some 180nm HV-CMOS SOI transmitter solutions are proposed to operate a data rate of up to 2Mbps. Extended simulations in an automotive environment model validate and compare the proposals.