Why automotive industry needs virtualisation?

By Guest Author,

Added 19 March 2017

It’s an age of digitisation. No industry is exception to this. In the automotive industry virtualisation is becoming more and more important. Here is an overview on the need of virtualisation.

Continental employs cross-domain High-Performance Computer in a car

Is India willing to invest in automotive R&D?

Navigating the intersection of sustainability and design in automotive manufacturing

Virtualisation is the process of creating a software-based (or virtual) representation of something rather than a physical one, boosting efficiency and agility for all size businesses. The question is can the same solution which was used in Computer industry be used to solve the problem Automotive Industry is facing now. Some of the key requirements from a virtualization solution, also called as Hypervisor or Multi-visor in Auto industry are:

Different levels of critically for e.g. IVI needs to have a greater tolerance for faults than instrument cluster
Fault tolerance and recovery i.e. failure in one system should not result in failure of other system
Graphics, videos, vehicle network has to optimised so that critical CAN messaged are processed in time and application prioritisation can be done

There are two approaches for solving the above problem, first is to modify the Hypervisor, which will need validation and re-certification effort and second is to make change in guest OS, which will be less risky due to localization of faults/ changes and flexible. Hence, we recommended approach of making changes to guest OS for adaptation to different application/ cluster needs.

Rapid innovation in Semiconductor industry with emergence of high-end SoCs with powerful IPs including GPUs, DSPs, Hardware support for virtualisation has enabled us to consolidate and functionally group the ECUs into various domains namely Cockpit domain, Power train domain, Safety domain, Body domain for e.g. Cockpit domain consolidates IVI, Instrument cluster, telematics control unit, Head up display functions.

Sasken has developed a solution to consolidate the cockpit controller unit that includes mixed criticality functions like Instrument cluster having high criticality and medium criticality functions like IVI. Sasken's solution comprises of an infotainment system based on AGL 3.0, leveraging the work done by open source community and a market proven digital instrument cluster. This is also driven by the fact that many of the high-end SOCs integrate units like modem, DSP in a single SOC.

END

Author Debashis Panigrahi is the Product Portfolio Manager at Sasken.