Knowledge Center
Navigation
Knowledge Center

Software-Defined Vehicles

popularity

Description

The automotive industry is deep in the throes of a massive shift to software-defined vehicle (SDV) architectures, a multi-year effort that will change the way automotive chips are designed, where they are used, and how they are sourced.

Creating a new vehicle architecture is no small feat. OEMs need to figure out who to partner with and which aspects of their current architecture to include. This shift involves moving away from the mechanical, hardware-centric point of view that has evolved over the course of a century, as well as the more recent single-feature-driven electronic control units (ECUs) and domain-driven architectures. The future is all about developing software first, and then building the hardware to tightly integrate and support that software.

The software framework in many respects resembles any PC-based environment. What it’s replacing is a distributed architecture that includes multiple ECUs with lots of microcontrollers, all running individual pieces of software that execute a specific function. The software before hardware approach is a very different skill set from what the OEMs traditionally have done, but the industry is embracing it. SDV also enables an advanced user experience.

The shift to software-defined vehicles is changing nearly every aspect of automotive design, from what hardware is added into vehicles, when it gets added, and what gets left behind.

Moving key features to software rather than hardware allows carmakers to bring new features to market faster, at a lower cost, and to modify those features more quickly. But it also will add significant complexity into vehicle design, requiring varying levels of integration between hardware and software and a deeper, ongoing understanding of how changes to one feature or system in a vehicle will affect others. On top of all of that, it will include a lot of guesswork about how future changes will affect that design.

Hardware, software, and firmware that are mission- and safety-critical must be able to handle software updates a decade or more into the future. For an industry defined by constant change and upgrades, predicting how software will evolve over a decade and how it can continue to work with today’s hardware architectures is a major challenge. The result is a lot of over-engineering.

Legacy software and hardware is only part of the problem. These systems must be simulated to a level that in some ways surpasses the capabilities of today’s digital twins. In effect, they will need to predict future trends, adapt to continual changes for security reasons, and still perform well enough to take advantage of still-undefined safety improvements and requirements. As a result, designers working on SDVs today find themselves in a unique environment in which going overboard on what a chip is capable of handling is acceptable. Demand for over-engineered chips originates with the OEMs, which increasingly require designer teams to plan for future compute needs.

The intricate intertwining of hardware and software in automotive has a long history. The long term goal, however, is to decouple that relationship — especially in situations where an automaker isn’t producing its own hardware and software in-house.

A digital twin of the entire vehicle’s electronic system is needed because the things being simulated are interdependent. Before the simulations can be run, one team needs to write the software to fit hardware that hasn’t yet been finished, while their counterparts must complete the hardware to fit software that doesn’t yet exist.

Alongside of all of this, security must be enabled and continually updated in all devices.

An SDV approach is a way of achieving that faster and more efficiently, but it requires an ecosystem to make it viable. For all these reasons, modern vehicles need an interconnect with high bandwidth, extreme reliability, and robust security.

Multimedia

Software-Defined Vehicles