Duo team up to deliver secure platform for vehicle networking

The platform enables global carmakers and their suppliers to add new levels of safe and secure performance while mixing applications with differing ASIL certification levels, including open source environments such as Linux, to power the next generation of central gateways and domain controllers in production vehicle programmes.

Vehicle manufacturers are seeking new ways to lower their electronics costs and reduce schedule risk in their shift to the software-defined car in the areas of vehicle networking, domain controllers and over-the-air services.

This approach requires safe and secure consolidation of previously disparate hardware and software components - some requiring ASIL safety certifications and security keys and credentials - on to a single SoC platform. At the same time, higher network communication performance, guaranteed real time determinism and decreased development times remain crucially important.

“We’re pleased to be working with Green Hills on this solution to enable customers to simplify the shift to high performance domain-based vehicle architectures,” said Ray Cornyn, Vice President and General Manager, Vehicle Network Processors at NXP Semiconductors.

“Today’s gateway and domain controller ECUs need high performance solutions such as the breakout S32G Vehicle Network Processor with a scalable, safe and secure software architecture from proven partners like Green Hills.”

The S32G Vehicle Network Processor is a high performance vehicle network processor, combining traditional automotive CAN/LIN/FlexRay with high data rate Ethernet networking. Other standout features include lockstep-capable clusters of Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M7 cores and a hardware security engine to accelerate encryption operations.

As a result, the S32G is well suited for central gateways and domain controllers connecting various networks and translating their protocols and Over-The-Air (OTA) software downloads and distribution to vehicle ECUs and secure key management.

By leveraging the hardware strengths of the S32G Vehicle Network Processor, the Green Hills Platform for Secure Gateway offers the most comprehensive and flexible set of capabilities:

• The INTEGRITY RTOS microkernel architecture was designed from the beginning for critical embedded systems demanding separation, security, determinism and guaranteed system resources. Pre-certified for ASIL D, its impenetrable separation partitions help software teams to safely and securely partition software running at different levels of criticality on the S32G Vehicle Network Processor while guaranteeing applications the system resources required for their proper execution.
• If Linux or Android environments are added, INTEGRITY Multivisor secure virtualisation runs them in safe, secure partitions, assuring freedom-from-interference while achieving near native execution speeds, secure and flexible inter-process communications and the option to share GPU or other critical acceleration resources on the S32G Vehicle Network Processor.
• INTEGRITY Board Support Packages (BSPs) can be tailored to support the S32G Vehicle Network Processor’s hardware acceleration units for automotive communication protocols, Ethernet, encryption and other hardware acceleration functions.
• Maximum performance of the S32G’s Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M7 cores is achieved by the Green Hills ASIL D qualified Green Hills C/C++ Optimising Compilers. The compilers leverage a 37-year old pedigree of optimisations that have set EEMBC benchmark records for maximum performance and smallest code size, and include auto-vectorisation and optimised support of NEON vector processing.
• A Complete AUTOSAR-compliant application framework allows existing AUTOSAR software components to be seamlessly integrated, and provides maximum software reuse without the need for virtualisation.
• Advanced software development tools that reduce development costs while increasing code quality are the ASIL D qualified MULTI IDE, MISRA C/C++ Adherence Checker and the OS-agnostic multicore debugger for Linux, INTEGRITY and bareboard platforms.
• Hardware encryption security services offered through INTEGRITY Security Services include secure boot, secure OTA, key generation and storage.