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Currently, OEMs worldwide are emphasizing more upon development and implementation of new electrical features on existing vehicles [3]. However, development and implementation of new electrical features on existing vehicle platforms create architectural as well as packaging challenges. These challenges are augmented due to following: the need to implement such features across different body styles of vehicles that are based on same or different architectures different requirement for a feature based upon market requirement This paper analyzes these challenges to help in providing design solutions for successful implementation of new features as per following requirements: 1 Provide optimum design to have low cost and high quality for existing vehicle platforms 2 Provide spare capacity while designing new vehicles or architectures

To cope with the increasing number of advanced features (e.g., smart-phone integration and side-blind zone alert.) being deployed in vehicles, automotive manufacturers are designing flexible hardware architectures which can accommodate increasing feature content with as fewer as possible hardware changes so as to keep future costs down. In this paper, we propose a formal and quantitative definition of flexibility, a related methodology and a tool flow aimed at maximizing the flexibility of an automotive hardware architecture with respect to the features that are of greater importance to the designer. We define flexibility as the ability of an architecture to accommodate future changes in features with no changes in hardware (no addition/replacement of processors, buses, or memories). We utilize an optimization framework based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) which computes the flexibility of the architecture while guaranteeing performance and safety requirements.