Telematic control unit

A telematic control unit (TCU) in the automobile industry refers to the embedded system on board of a vehicle that controls tracking of the vehicle.

A TCU consists of:

• a global positioning system (GPS) unit, which keeps track of the latitude and longitude values of the vehicle;
• an external interface for mobile communication (GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi, WiMax, or LTE), which provides the tracked values to a centralized geographical information system (GIS) database server;
• an electronic processing unit;
• a microcontroller, in some versions; a microprocessor or field programmable gate array (FPGA), which processes the information and acts on the interface between the GPS;
• a mobile communication unit;
• and some amount of memory for saving GPS values in case of mobile-free zones or to intelligently store information about the vehicle's sensor data.