Overview
The vehicle E/E architecture of cars is becoming more sophisticated and complex every day, but its development time tends to be shorter than before. Visualizing the behavior of the complex E/E architecture is an urgent issue for efficient development. We are working on planning, proposing, and developing a new integrated development environment to solve this problem.
Background
With the evolution of AD/ADAS, electrification, and connected technologies, the electronic and electrical architecture of vehicles (E/E architecture) is becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated. In conventional E/E architectures, ECUs (electronic control units) were isolated and most likely functioned individually. But now the E/E architecture is evolving to Domain architecture and then to Zone architecture where the vehicle E/E system is divided into multiple “Zones” and these “Zones” are controlled by Central ECUs with enormous computing power. In such Domain/Zone architectures, many ECUs work together in a complex manner, and multiple in-vehicle processors are installed in a high-performance ECU such as the central ECU.
As the E/E architecture evolves, the degree of difficulty in the E/E system development is increasing. To manage this difficulty, Renesas has proposed various solutions to the market (ref. 1, 2, 3). In addition, from the perspective of the development environment & tools, we believe the following three points are important;
- Support for system optimization: The more complex and larger a system becomes, the more difficult it becomes to find out where the bottlenecks in performance and processing capacity are. One of the keys is to provide a means to visualize it.
- Tools easy-to-integrate into the customer workflow: CI/CD is now the most popular practice in the industry, and it is increasingly important for software development environments to be easily integrated into an automated development workflow.
- Consistent development environment: Many developers are involved in software development on E/E architecture and working on a variety of tools/target environment (real/virtual) / locations. Providing a consistent development environment and UX for such a wide variety of developers is one of the keys to improving productivity.
Examples of our challenges
Our team is working on planning, proposing, and developing development environments and tools that bring new value to vehicles by supporting customers’ E/E architecture development. For example:
- Profiling and calibration tools that support the optimization of systems composed of multiple ECUs and processors
- Development of a tool portfolio that fits with customers' development workflows (Agile, CI/CD) and containerization trends
- Provision of remote development environment for Post-COVID-19, etc.
Conclusion
The evolution of E/E architecture continues unabated. The development environment and tools also have to evolve to support such a trend. Renesas continues its efforts to provide development environment and tool solutions that support the innovation of the automotive industry.