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 explicitly selects a primary perception chain and prioritizes its enclosure within a single SoC pair over the non-critical paths (ii) Exposure-Time-Aligned, which propagates the primary sensor's exposure time $τ_{\rm exp}$ as a tag along the chain and event-drives the fusion node on matched $τ_{\rm exp}$ 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 $τ_{\rm exp}$ cycle. On a Dual-SoC production AD-ECU, the implementation closes camera-shutter to planner-output latency at a mean of 296 ms within the 350 ms design budget. Under (iii), the modular pipeline is primary at production launch and the E2E path runs as shadow on real vehicles, and the E2E scope is expanded as evaluation evidence accumulates.

翻译：尽管端到端（E2E）自动驾驶已成为主导研究方向，但在一个重要的过渡期内，量产车辆仍依赖模块化多NN流水线。本文的主题是设计一种架构，在此阶段同时支持模块化流水线和E2E路径，并嵌入一条用于分阶段迁移的路径。移植到量产SoC上，平等主义式的后融合计算效率低下，且缺乏用于阶段性E2E替代的自然单元。作为替代方案，我们提出三项设计原则：（i）主路径（Primary-Path），明确选择一条主感知链，并优先将其封闭在单个SoC对中，而非临界路径；（ii）曝光时间对齐（Exposure-Time-Aligned），将主传感器的曝光时间$τ_{\rm exp}$作为标签沿链传播，并在匹配$τ_{\rm exp}$的事件驱动下触发融合节点，而非固定周期；（iii）共路径共存（Co-Path Coexistence），在（i）和（ii）的基础上，允许E2E输出路径与模块化流水线在同一$τ_{\rm exp}$周期内共运行。在双SoC量产AD-ECU上，该实现将相机快门到规划器输出的延迟锁定在296毫秒的平均值内，满足350毫秒的设计预算。在（iii）下，模块化流水线在量产启动时作为主路径，E2E路径作为影子在实车上运行，并随评估证据的积累逐步扩展E2E范围。