Mentor Graphics
has introduced the first member of its tool suite for
Autosar
- the incoming industry standard for the hierarchical design of car
electronics.
"Vehicle Systems Architect (VSA) enables Autosar-based system
and embedded software design with support for FlexRay, CAN and LIN
network design," said Mentor. "VSA facilitates the use of standard
interfaces and components based on Autosar."
Autosar (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) comes from a
worldwide development partnership of car manufacturers; car part
suppliers; and electronics, semiconductor and software
companies.
"The Autosar standard does a great job of standardising, but it
doesn't necessarily simplify the design process," said Serge Leef,
general manager of system-level engineering at Mentor.
"To design Autosar-based systems, you need tools that take the
complexity out of the design process and allow development teams to
focus on their real jobs of delivering application software, ECUs
[electronic control units] or the networking system. This is what
we are providing today."
According to Mentor, VSA focuses on model-driven design
incorporating the Autosar standard, allowing engineers to design,
explore and compare electronic and software architectures.
"This approach allows customers to reduce their reliance on
downstream validation and physical prototyping," it claimed.
"Automotive companies can move significant decisions and
verification tasks to the front end of the design cycle."
More Autosar tools: for virtual integration, network design,
compliance testing, ECU configuration; are in the pipeline.
"They are from scratch. We started almost two years ago from
zero," Joachim Langenwalter, director for Mentor's automotive
networking business told Electronics Weekly. "As well as
VSA, some others have been released, but we have to have be certain
they are accepted by customers before we launch them
officially."
Mentor claims its suite will offer users correct-by-construction
design methods to reduce reliance on test-oriented validation. For
interaction between OEMs and tier1 suppliers, multi-partner
distributed iterative development is supported.
"The number of Autosar ECUs is increasing significantly in the
automobile industry within the next car generations. In order to
design those systems, the industry is looking for an open
tool-framework supporting the full Autosar metamodel for authoring,
consistency check and validation; an example of this would be
Eclipse.
We don't need a short term solution but instead a solution which
supports the future Autosar process even in a more long term
perspective," said Autosar founder Dr Guenter Reichart.
Autosar interfaces define relationships between
middleware subsystems and modules.
Autosar specifies a comprehensive collection of modules
and interfaces in the ECUs.
System architects face multiple, frequently conflicting
requirements that need to be reconciled in order to create an
efficient distributed system for avehicle.
VSA combines capabilities that enable architectural
design, function mapping, network design and analysis from logical
and physical perspectives.