Cars are going through some fundamental changes. Not only is the
amount of electronics in a car dramatically increasing, but the
design approaches used for system-on-chip devices are now being
adopted for the cars themselves, and for the systems that include
cars. Which means car makers moving to system level design
tools.
Tool makers are starting to pay attention, with major sessions on
the tools and requirements for automotive design at this year’s
Design Automation Conference (DAC).
“We really have the opportunity to create a new DNA for
automobiles,” says Lawrence Burns, v-p of R&D and strategic
planning at General Motors (GM). “There’s an enormous opportunity
to accelerate the growth of the auto industry in a truly
sustainable way. We are talking about a transformation that is
every bit as dramatic as the transition from horse power.”
“It really is the land of opportunity for EDA because automotive
electronic design is at a similar stage to where IC design was in
the 1970s,” says Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics.
“OEMs want to simulate the whole car in a server farm, with each
electronic control unit mapped to a processor in that farm,” says
Alain Labat, CEO of VaST Systems. “It’s a development and research
issue. The challenge is the debug environment - pulling the data
out.”
As one of the world’s largest car manufacturers, GM is also working
on moving to all-electric vehicles powered by fuel cells. That
means integrating the mechanical, electrical, electronics and
software design systems, which again needs high level
modelling.
“We see the traditional combustion engine being replaced by
electric propulsion with fuel cells,” says Burns. He led a five
year project which ended earlier this year with an electric car
that travelled over 300 miles on public roads. GM built two of
these vehicles, called the Sequel, using high level modelling tools
right from the start.
“The beauty is that when we developed the Sequel we built it all in
math initially and were able to get them up and running in a
relatively short period of time,” he says. “We have the fourth
generation fuel cells with regenerative power, by-wire braking and
Flexray standard systems. There’s never been a vehicle that puts
together all these systems before.”
But it is not just the car itself. GM’s OnStar automatic crash
notification technology, using GPS satellite navigation, notifies a
hospital and ambulance of a crash.
Vehicle2Vehicle (V2V) technology adds a variant of WiFi to link
cars on the road to exchange data.
“We have taken advantage of OnStar being standard on vehicles and
the stability control keeps track of the wheel speeds and that
allows us to work out the position to within 1m and predict where
they will be in the next 20s,” says Burns.
“We will still have a few short range sensors but the key is the
V2V. This sets up the possibility of vehicles that drive themselves
and by 2015 the technology for autonomous driving will be here, and
it is up to society to work out how it will be used.”
Cars are already being designed from the top down, with modelling
systems for describing the whole system, including the software.
“We can model the end to end delays from sensors to actuators with
math based modelling tools such as those from The MathWorks,” says
Burns at GM. “This allows us to capture the character of the car
with software.”
Mentor Graphics sees the AutoSAR software standard as the way to
link all the systems together at a high level.
“It provides an interface between these electronic control units
and the system level electronics that allows for standard
interfaces and builds a hierarchy from the applications software
down to the hardware,” says Rhines. “The big problem is for every
ECU there is application software, middleware networking software
and typically these come from multiple sources.”
This is happening now, and Rhines sees full AutoSAR cars coming to
market in 2010.
“The automotive industry is pushing for a true AutoSAR hierarchy
much faster than anyone anticipated as there is cost pressure and
complexity issues that the industry and supplies are pushing,” he
says.
This has created opportunities for companies such as VaST Systems,
not only with the chip companies but with the car makers to develop
both hardware and software.
“The semiconductor companies are our partners – our customers are
the tier one companies in the automotive supply chain where we are
going to see the bigger deployments,” says VaST’s Labat. “Toyota is
our number one customer and we have the top five suppliers
supporting and developing platforms on VaST tools.”
“Today we are solving the software system development and
verification problems,” says Jeffrey Roane, v-p marketing at VaST.
“Hybrid vehicles will have over 100 ECUs so the software content is
going through the roof and programming them all has always been
challenging.”
As a result, VaST is also pushing AutoSAR. “We are engaging with
the AutoSAR initiative,” says Labat. “It’s something we want to
embrace and our customers want us to be there…, because this is
going to be the key to adoption by the large OEMs.”
“We believe we are the de facto standard,” adds Roane. “Infineon
has got to the stage of distributing VaST models to its customers
to win business.”
But there are still gaps and challenges for the EDA vendor. The
mixed signal tools for embedded flash and EMC modelling in
automotive systems are still poor, so companies such as Infineon
Technologies have had to design their own EM tools for devices such
as the TriCore embedded processor.
“The big issue is the analogue/digital, and we never do any pure
digital,” says Hartmut Hiller, senior director design methodology
at Infineon. “My impression is that the EDA vendors cultivate the
gap between these two communities.”
And the safety critical nature of the software is also vital for
GM. “We are developing our own code translation rules, and a lot of
this is pretty important because we are talking about safety
critical systems,” says Burn.
This creates an opportunity for the vendors. “In analogue and mixed
signal we can’t provide a simulator just for the processor so
customers connect us to MathWorks for mechanicals, or Sabre for
analogue, and co-simulate,” says Roane at VaST.
Automotive has become a key driver for design tools for high level
modelling, or electronic system level design. Being able to model
the whole of the car –software, electronics, mechanics and even its
shape - allows the automotive designers to move faster and avoid
the ‘perfect storm’ of rising costs, increased competition, eroding
pricing power, and reduced time to market.
This extends even further to modelling the wider system with
networking capabilities and links between vehicles that offers even
more safety improvements to protect vehicle drivers.