January 7, 2016
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723, “Renesas”), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, and TTTech Computertechnik AG (“TTTech”), a global leader in robust networking and safety controls, today announced their agreement on collaborating on a development of a new automotive platform solution, aimed at providing a future proof, high-performance advanced electronic control unit (ECU) development platform for driver assistance systems (ADAS). The automotive platform solution will integrate Renesas’ automotive control microcontroller (MCU), the RH850/P1x, and high-performance R-Car system-on-chips (SoCs) with TTTech’s TTIntegration, a software platform to enable highly complex automotive solutions including highly automated driving. Additionally to the physical integration, the development platform achieves parallel, multi-vendor development and integration of individual software components.
Currently, expectations towards autonomous vehicles are growing and there is a demand for realizing highly automated functions at low power consumption. The increasing abundance of image sensor information as well as its assessment and resulting actions require hardware and software implementations that have high performance and safety standards. Furthermore, the assembly of a variety of sensors and functions means new challenges for the implementation of software. This is due to the fact that technologies from different suppliers must be developed in parallel and integrated together as smoothly as possible. These different software packages have to share the resources of available CPUs, hardware accelerators and communication networks in operation without interrupting other applications by blocking shared resources.
The collaboration between Renesas and TTTech is designed to respond to these software implementation challenges. The flexibility during development and product definition will continue to grow as the software components are no longer tied to individual semiconductors, but can run on different MCUs, SoCs, and on one or even more ECUs. In order to ensure the necessary safety during operation, various Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) levels[1] on a common automotive open system architecture (AUTOSAR) interface will be made available.
Renesas adds its expertise in this collaboration as a globally leading semiconductor solution supplier to the automotive sector, providing high-performance and low power semiconductor solutions, including MCUs, SoCs, middleware and development kits, to the mass markets, which are requiring cost-sensitive implementation of safety and comfort features. Renesas provides system manufacturers the choice and timely integration of best-in-class software through open application programming interfaces (APIs) and leading tools. Renesas enables functional safety up to ASIL-D, the highest level of functionality safety standard out of ASIL, in its semiconductors, meeting the high demands for security in road traffic. The stringent development of product families brings the developer a high degree of scalability for products that can cover all segments - from premium to entry-level vehicles.
The centrepieces of TTTech’s ADAS platform are TTIntegration and Deterministic Ethernet. TTIntegration is located and runs as middleware between the CPU level and the integrated applications. It provides each application with the CPU time and memory it needs, while separating or even abstracting hardware from applications. Therefore, the origin of data and data usage are strictly decoupled (location transparency). Delivering an AUTOSAR environment for various operating systems enables system manufacturers to move applications between the embedded cores more easily. TTIntegration supports various safety levels simultaneously. A strict partitioning concept ensures at any time that a bug or defect in one specific application cannot harm any other or even cause a collapse of the whole ECU. The concept grants “Freedom from Interference” as demanded by the highest automotive development safety norms. The platform solution uses TTTech’s Deterministic Ethernet, a reliable and real-time capable Ethernet backbone solution, for the communication.
[1]Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) is defined by the ISO 26262 - Functional Safety for Road Vehicles standard.
