Automotive ECU virtualisation solution platform debuts

Renesas Electronics Corporation has released an integrated automotive ECU Virtualisation Platform that allows designers to integrate multiple applications into a single ECU safely and securely separated from each other to avoid interference. The solution will enable customers to adopt new electrical-electronic (E/E) architectures employing MCU-based zone ECUs supporting multiple logical ECUs on one physical ECU. Migration to the new platform maximises legacy reuse with minimum development effort to use gains in lower power consumption and decreased vehicle wiring harness weight and complexity.

The ECU virtualisation solution platform combines the company's RH850/U2x MCUs with ETAS' RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor developed for microcontrollers with hardware virtualisation support. This platform delivers a ready-to-use demonstrator environment including pre-configured embedded software, tools and an interactive demonstrator environment for RH850/U2x MCUs, enabling automotive customers to explore design choices for the development of their individual Zone-ECU project.

"The transition to a zone architecture increases the design burden by changing the functional role assignments between the central ECU and each zone ECU," said Satoshi Yoshida, senior director, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas. "In addition to the high performance provided by the RH850/U2x MCUs, I am confident that this new ECU Virtualisation Solution Platform will give our customers the advantage of easy, fast development of advanced systems with built-in safety and security features."

"Working together with Renesas, we were able to leverage the HW capabilities of the RH850/U2x MCUs to deliver a high performance, low overhead, embedded hypervisor for automotive applications that complements class-leading AUTOSAR OS technologies," said Nigel Tracey, vice president of Vehicle Operating Systems at ETAS.

The unique RH850/U2x Zone-ECU Starter Kit is available as part of the solution. The new kit provides a 'ready-to-run' configuration of RTA-HVR showcasing different VM configurations (single-core, multi-core and multi-VM per core). Guest software images are provided for each configured VMs, including bare metal and guest images using ETAS's RTA-CAR Classic AUTOSAR solution. It offers example virtual devices for peripheral sharing and virtual inter-VM networking (a 'virtual CAN').