An Exposure-Time-Aligned Primary-Path Architecture for Autonomous-Driving ECUs

Abstract

While end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has become the dominant research direction, production vehicles continue to rely on modular multi-NN pipelines for a non-trivial transitional period. The subject of this paper is the design of an architecture that, during this phase, supports a modular pipeline and an E2E path side by side and embeds a path for staged migration. Transplanted to a production SoC, egalitarian late fusion is compute-inefficient and offers no natural unit for staged E2E substitution. As an alternative, we propose three design principles: (i) Primary-Path, which selects a primary perception-to-planner chain and prioritizes its enclosure within a single SoC over the non-critical paths, (ii) Exposure-Time-Aligned, which propagates the primary sensor's exposure time $τ_{\mathrm{exp}}$ as a tag along the chain and event-drives the fusion node on matched $τ_{\mathrm{exp}}$ rather than a fixed cycle, and (iii) Co-Path Coexistence, which, building on (i) and (ii), lets an E2E output path co-run with the modular pipeline within the same $τ_{\mathrm{exp}}$ cycle. On a Dual-SoC production AD-ECU, the implementation achieves a camera-shutter to planner-output latency of 296 ms on average within a 350 ms design budget, with the modular pipeline and the E2E path coexisting within the shared $τ_{\mathrm{exp}}$ cycle.