Toyota Systems Corporation and Fujitsu Limited – together with Toyota Motor Corporation – have successfully applied quantum-inspired technology and AI to automate part of the automotive design process.
In a global first for the automotive industry the technology was used to automate connector pin placement design. Connector pins are metal components that transmit electrical signals between circuits and are installed in the vehicle’s electric control unit or ECU which functions as an onboard computer controlling vehicle systems.
The mobility industry faces growing pressure to achieve sustainable product development while managing increasingly complex software and hardware architectures amid a shortage of skilled engineers. In Toyota’s ECU development process designing a 100-pin terminal array theoretically involves an enormous number of combinations estimated at 9.3 x 10^157. This complexity led to extended design review cycles and heavy dependence on individual expertise.
Toyota Systems and Fujitsu collaborated with Toyota to automate the process by applying Toyota’s design standards Toyota Systems’ CAE operational knowledge and Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer and AI technologies. Engineers trained an AI model using historical connector pin placement patterns and evaluation scores derived from expert experience. The model was translated into mathematical expressions and processed at high speed using the Digital Annealer to identify optimal pin configurations.
As a result the design process was accelerated by more than 20 times compared to conventional methods.
Toyota Systems plans to extend the approach to suppliers while Fujitsu supports sustainable mobility development by improving design speed quality and cost efficiency across the Toyota Group.
