SDV Safety Calls for Partnerships, Open Source

Industry experts from Codasip, Elektrobit, TTTech Auto and the Eclipse Foundation discuss safety and security of self-driving software-defined vehicles as well as challenges that this concept represents for automakers.

www.eetimes.eu/, May. 30, 2023 – 

As cars swap internal combustion engines for electric motors and become increasingly autonomous and connected, they are transforming from a collection of various electromechanical parts to highly integrated software-defined platforms that can add features and capabilities over time. At EE Times' Advanced Automotive Tech Forum 2023, industry experts from Codasip, Elektrobit, TTTech Auto and the Eclipse Foundation discussed safety and security of self-driving software-defined vehicles (SDVs) as well as challenges that this concept represents for automakers.

A strategic inflection point

The increasing number of electronically controlled components in modern vehicles need to work in concert with each other. Traditionally, those mechanical components were controlled by electronic control units (ECUs) operated by the on-board computer. But when a vehicle must perform hundreds of operations while considering data from dozens of sensors every second, it becomes inefficient to map all the ECUs and sensors together manually. Instead, it makes sense to logically disaggregate software layer from physical layer.

"[One Level 3 autonomous driving project that we have is running] about 400 different tasks, performing 100 applications, and then we have like 100 constraints; [for example,] if a pedestrian walks in front of your sensor set, then you need to react in a matter of milliseconds to engage on the actuation and braking side," said Stefan Poledna, CTO at TTTech Auto. "You need to map that onto the ECUs; we have about 50 CPU cores running there, we have four different hardware accelerators there, two TSN switches, 1,000 virtual links. Basically, you need to make this mapping from your logical software function, in terms of execution communication, to these hardware resources to meet all the constraints. As those applications get so complex, this goes beyond what you can do in a manual fashion. This is where we are linking up this logical software layer to the physical hardware."

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