Renesas estreia plataforma de solução de virtualização de ECU automotiva

Renesas Debuts Automotive ECU Virtualization Solution Platform

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, recently announced an integrated automotive electronic control unit (ECU) virtualization platform that allows designers to integrate multiple applications into a single ECU that are securely separated from each other to avoid interference .

The solution enables customers to adopt new electronics (E/E) architectures using MCU-based zone ECUs, supporting multiple logical ECUs in one physical ECU. Migration to the new platform maximizes legacy reuse with minimal development effort to take advantage of gains in lower power consumption and reduced vehicle wiring harness weight and complexity.

The ECU virtualization solution platform combines Renesas RH850/U2x MCUs along with ETAS' RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor designed for microcontrollers supporting hardware virtualization. This platform provides a ready-to-use demonstration environment including pre-configured embedded software, tools and an interactive demonstration environment for RH850/U2x MCUs – enabling automotive customers to explore design options for the development of their individual Zone-ECU project .

“The transition to a zone architecture increases the design burden by changing functional role assignments between the central ECU and each zone ECU,” said Satoshi Yoshida, senior director of Renesas Automotive Digital Product Marketing Division. “In addition to the high performance provided by the RH850/U2x MCUs, I am confident that this new ECU virtualization solution platform will give our customers the advantage of easy and rapid development of advanced systems with integrated safety and security features.”

RH850/U2x MCUs, including RH850/U2A and RH850/U2B, offer a cost-effective and high-performance solution for next-generation zone/integration ECUs due to a rich set of embedded hardware that realizes integration of multiple ASIL-compliant modules D. software partitions. MCUs are designed specifically for zone applications, aiming to reduce ECU component count with minimal re-engineering overhead.

The RH850/U2x MCUs include features such as hypervisor hardware support, quality of service support (RH850/U2B only), safety and security functions to enable freedom from interference, and a high-performance Network-on-Chip (NoC) structure to ensure proper real-time behavior of individual integrated applications.

ETAS' RTA-HVR software works with the hardware virtualization capabilities of Renesas RH850U2x MCUs to provide one or more virtual machines (VMs). VMs are separated from each other in space (using the RH850U2x memory protection unit and protection features) and time (using the RTA-HVR VM scheduler) to meet strict automotive safety and security requirements. RTA-HVR provides a toolkit for building a virtual device extension (VDE).

Each VM comprises one or more virtual CPU cores, a subset of device memory space, and a collection of peripherals.

“Working together with Renesas, we were able to leverage the HW capabilities of the RH850/U2x MCUs to provide a high-performance, low-overhead integrated hypervisor for automotive applications that complements the class-leading technologies of the AUTOSAR operating system,” said Nigel Tracey, Vice President of Vehicle Operating Systems at ETAS.

The starter kit

The exclusive 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 featuring different VM configurations (single-core, multi-core, and multi-VM per core). Guest software images are provided for each of the configured VMs, including bare metal and guest images using ETAS' RTA-CAR Classic AUTOSAR solution. It provides examples of virtual devices for sharing peripherals and virtual networks between VMs (a “virtual CAN”).

Additionally, a PC-hosted application allows users to observe and interact with VMs at runtime. The PC app supports numerous actions, including:

  • Trigger system crashes at runtime to explore VM behavior during memory violations, timeouts, etc.
  • Update a VM while other VMs are running using the RH850/U2x's wait-free OTA capabilities.
  • Exploring the performance impact of alternative VM switching mechanisms
  • Enabling developers to see the impact of hardware QoS capabilities

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