Effective timing design essential to development of ADAS / EU2

Luxoft Holding has announced its new Symtavision subsidiary offers development services for the growing area of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for the automotive industry with software tools and services for real-time system design and development. Symtavision is a provider of automotive software tools and consulting services for scheduling analysis, architecture optimization, and timing verification. The acquisition expands Luxoft’s embedded software automotive offerings as the company seeks to fulfil its targeted end-to-end offering. “We are excited about the synergy between our two organizations," said Luxoft’s automotive managing director, Georg Doll. “Symtavision’s customer base and range of solutions are highly complementary to those of Luxoft. Their tools and services are deployed at some of the leading premium and volume car manufacturers and Tier-1 suppliers. It is also worth noting that a significant part of their revenue is driven from licenses, which is in line with Luxoft’s strategy.” According to Symtavision, an emerging leader for timing design and timing verification for embedded real-time systems, the development of ADAS introduces totally new challenges and significantly higher levels of design complexity, making the adoption of effective timing design, analysis and verification tools essential in their design. “ADAS is a disruptive technology that will fundamentally challenge the way automotive electric/electronic (E/E) and software systems have been built and integrated in the past,” said Dr. Kai Richter, CTO, Symtavision. “ADAS significantly adds to the software cross-dependencies in vehicles, which, in order to execute all of the required new functions, will need additional levels of computing performance and network communications far exceeding that of established vehicle E/E systems. To make the step-change needed to turn concepts into reality, the integration of effective timing design, analysis and verification tools into the overall design process will be crucial.” With the development of ADAS, comes the introduction of new types of sensors, new object and trajectory recognition functions and new virtual reality video projection technology among others. These will also generate data for the automated driving functions to predict and determine how the vehicle should act in terms of the primary control functions, such as accelerating, steering, braking etc. All these control functions must also cope with new safety and reliability requirements. To facilitate this, in-vehicle computing power will need to be dramatically increased with topologies changing from heavily distributed controllers to fewer, high-performance computing centres that are connected directly to dozens of sensors and actuators spread over the vehicle. “It is a highly sophisticated task to efficiently utilize these platforms,” said Dr. Richter. “Also, they have to be utilized optimally as the software usually grows faster than the platform developers can imagine. Timing analysis is the key enabler for this optimization and, to assist in the optimization process, we provide customers with consultancy services for requirements collection and the development of optimized system architectures for the highly integrated systems found in the ADAS domain today. They also value our ongoing commitment to ensuring that our tools are kept fully up-to-date for the requirements and new technologies being introduced.” The latest SymTA/S 3.8 release, for example, adds worst-case timing analysis for Ethernet communication ‘in several flavours’ including AVB and time-triggered Ethernet, and also covers the ADAS software technology for both AUTOSAR and non-AUTOSAR operating systems, with timing analysis for partitioned and hierarchical schedulers (with or without hypervisor). In addition, SymTA/S’ 'unique' end-to-end timing analysis supports heterogeneous mixes of both event and time-triggered applications and architectures, as well as statistical simulation and worst-case analysis, and compatibility with the existing OSEK, CAN, LIN, and FlexRay modules, says the company.