Software-Defined Vehicles

Speed is everything when it comes to designing automotive electronics, but not in the usual way. In the past, product cycles often lasted five to seven years, from initial design to implementation inside of vehicles. That no longer works as vehicles adopt more electronics to replace mechanical functionality, and as competition heats up over the latest features and nearly instantaneous over-the-air updates to modify existing ones. Kevin Brand, principal engineer at Synopsys, and Dinesh Selvaraj, lead principal engineer at Infineon, talk with Semiconductor Engineering about the need to raise the abstraction level for electronic control units, how that can reduce the time and cost it takes to design and test these devices with improved coverage, and what's required on the software side to make all of this work.