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Opportunities abound for EDA in automotive electronics

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 6/6/2007

With advanced features in the automobile such as telematics, entertainment, navigation, and electronic stability control requiring equally advanced electronics, the fact that there is an increasing amount of electronic sophistication in the automobile is not new.

What is new, however, is the increased focus that semiconductor and system level design tool providers are paying to the automotive industry.

During a panel today at the Design Automation Conference being held in San Diego this week, Dr. Walden Rhines, chairman and CEO of EDA tool supplier Mentor Graphics Corp. pointed out, “You don’t have to look far to see electronics in our everyday automobiles and see the explosion that has occurred for all sorts of reasons: differentiating features, legal requirements, safety, cost reduction: there is a proliferation.”

“But what’s really exciting is the vector that we’re on – the use of electronics in automobiles is increasing at a very rapid rate and there are credible projections that say by the end of the decade, 40 percent of the bill of materials of an automobile will be in electronics,” he noted.

With all those electronics, connectivity is just as critical. In fact, Rhines said the interconnection of automotive electronics over the last few decades has moved up orders of magnitude in terms of complexity as well as the problems associated with ensuring communication over that interconnect is reliable.

“Many have postulated that in effect, automobiles are becoming the next node on the information highway,” he offered.

As evidence of the opportunity, Rhines pointed to a quote by BMW’s CEO that the BMW 7 series will have 70 to 80 electronic control units (ECUs), and those electronics would be 40 to 45 percent of the total cost of the car.

One opportunity for EDA to have an impact in the automotive electronic product development cycle is embedded software given that automobiles have embedded some of the most complex software and software systems that electronics people have to deal with, and there are a lot of things going on to try to attack the problem before it becomes so critical that we can’t design cars anymore, Rhines explained.

“There are hundreds of software modules within a car, and every one of those applications that is embedded, that is electronic, talks to other things. They imply if there is an application, there is communication. There are many opportunities for quality problems because each electronic control unit in a car has within it, embedded software, middleware, application software and frequently that software is written by different people, different companies and integrated together,” he offered.

“Multiply 50 or 60 ECUs times three software subsystems and then add to that the problem of putting things together through interfaces and you have the potential for a low quality system. And we have therefore spawned an entire infrastructure in the industry that provides consulting services on the integration side and other parts of the design flow to bring these different vendors together and to try to match some of these interfaces,” Rhines noted.

One proposed standard that Rhines believes will have a big impact on solving the problem of embedded software and hardware in automotive system design is AUTOSAR, a set of specifications and interfaces that allow applications to be isolated from the middleware through a development environment.

With AUTOSAR, “we can look not too far away to a time when we can move blocks of software from one ECU to another without total rewrite, where developers can develop for more than one automobile model, more than one company, reuse software and have a structure that supports a reliable process of development,” he said.

There are lots and lots of places where EDA companies have already specialized in the development of tools, flows, infrastructures for the automobile industry, Rhines concluded.