Software playing a key role in ADAS

Luxoft recently announced that it has acquired Symtavision, a provider of automotive software tools and consulting services for scheduling analysis, architecture optimisation and timing verification. This acquisition expands Luxoft’s embedded software automotive offerings as the company seeks to fulfil its targeted end-to-end offering.

“We are excited about the synergy between our two organisations," said Luxoft’s Automotive Managing Director, Georg Doll. “Symtavision’s customer base and range of solutions are highly complementary to those of Luxoft. Their tools and services are deployed at some of the leading premium and volume car manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers. It is also worth noting that a significant part of their revenue is driven from licenses, which is in line with Luxoft’s strategy.”

According to Symtavision, the development of ADAS introduces totally new challenges and significantly higher levels of design complexity, making the adoption of effective timing design, analysis and verification tools essential in their design.

“ADAS is a disruptive technology that will fundamentally challenge the way automotive electric/electronic (E/E) and software systems have been built and integrated in the past,” said Dr Kai Richter, CTO of Symtavision. “ADAS significantly adds to the software cross-dependencies in vehicles which, in order to execute all of the required new functions, will need additional levels of computing performance and network communications far exceeding that of established vehicle E/E systems. To make the step-change needed to turn concepts into reality, the integration of effective timing design, analysis and verification tools into the overall design process will be crucial.”

With the development of ADAS comes the introduction of new types of sensors, new object and trajectory recognition functions and new virtual reality video projection technology among others. These will also generate data for the automated driving functions to predict and determine how the vehicle should act in terms of the primary control functions, such as accelerating, steering, braking etc. All these control functions must also cope with new safety and reliability requirements. To facilitate this, in-vehicle computing power will need to be dramatically increased with topologies changing from heavily distributed controllers to fewer, high performance computing centres that are connected directly to dozens of sensors and actuators spread over the vehicle.

“It is a highly sophisticated task to efficiently utilise these platforms,” said Richter. “Also, they have to be utilised optimally as the software usually grows faster than the platform developers can imagine. Timing analysis is the key enabler for this optimisation and, to assist in the optimisation process, we provide customers with consultancy services for requirements collection and the development of optimised system architectures for the highly integrated systems found in the ADAS domain today. They also value our ongoing commitment to ensuring that our tools are kept fully up to date for the requirements and new technologies being introduced.”

The latest SymTA/S 3.8 release, for example, adds worst case timing analysis for Ethernet communication in several flavours including AVB and time triggered Ethernet, and also covers the ADAS software technology for both AUTOSAR and non-AUTOSAR operating systems, with timing analysis for partitioned and hierarchical schedulers (with or without hypervisor). In addition, SymTA/S’ end-to-end timing analysis supports heterogeneous mixes of both event and time triggered applications and architectures, as well as statistical simulation and worst case analysis, and compatibility with the existing OSEK, CAN, LIN, and FlexRay modules.