The automotive industry has entered an intense period of innovation, powered by advances in semiconductor, electronic and software technologies. These emerging technologies will enable a new era of mobility, with technology that is safer and accessible to more people through greater levels of driver assistance and autonomy, less polluting through electrification of powertrain, and offers new experiences for passengers through better connectivity and shared services.
Arm’s vision is that compute power will transform our mobility expectations and experiences. However, delivering on this vision creates new challenges in building tools for designing, developing, and testing these new automotive systems. We need to accelerate and simplify the development and testing process, while fostering innovation and collaboration within the automotive supply chain. Today’s announcement that Arm is working with Siemens to bring their PAVE360 platform together with leading automotive Arm IP is the latest result of such a collaboration.
By using the PAVE360 platform, automakers and suppliers can now simulate and validate complex Arm-based automotive systems and systems-on-chips (SoCs) inside the context of a vehicle long before it is built. This allows a level of testing, optimization and validation not previously possible, enabling innovation around system architectures, IP and software to meet the needs of the use case.
Siemens PAVE360: Arm-based automotive system design with a digital twin
Each modern vehicle model typically undergoes several million miles of on-the-road and lab testing before it is ready for certification to international regulations and standards. As vehicles integrate increasingly more complex electronics and software directly impacting safety, it becomes impractical to physically test vehicles to ensure sufficient compliance as this would need hundreds of millions of miles of road and lab-based testing and taking many years to complete. PAVE360 enables modelling and development of complex automotive systems, incorporating Arm-based SoCs, through the use of virtual electronic control units (ECUs) and even full system digital twin modelling within the context of the vehicle and its environment.
If these models of vehicle systems and Arm-based SoCs have sufficiently high fidelity and accuracy, they can become highly correlated to the physical vehicle platform and driving environment. This enables efficient test and validation of systems, including the corner cases which would be impractical to consistently reproduce in the real world. Entire software stacks can also be run on the digital twin, enabling full system functionality, power and performance information which can help optimize and validate the design.
This new capability, for example, could allow an automaker and its suppliers to develop and test an ADAS system, running scenarios which could include normal driving conditions as well as a range of unlikely events such as obstacles in the road, or specific types of traffic accidents, weather, and road conditions. Hardware and software can be developed in tandem, and different sensor arrangements could be evaluated, as could various configurations of compute from the broad range of Arm automotive IP, to identify the right compute for the application. This kind of flexibility and coverage allows system designers to efficiently develop innovative solutions to automotive challenges.
Safety is of prime importance in automotive applications, and PAVE360 can help with functional safety verification and validation of systems, with compliance being shown under complex scenarios using realistic sensor data and vehicle dynamics, and exercising system and SoC functional safety capability.
Fostering innovation and collaboration
The Arm automotive portfolio of heterogenous compute IP scales bumper-to-bumper across the performance points and constraints found in vehicles from the high-performance processing needed for autonomous driving, to the modest compute needed for body applications. The partnership between Siemens and Arm combines this industry-leading IP with leading-edge methodologies, processes, and tools to help manage the complexity of the design and validation of automotive systems and SoCs. This collaboration will unlock new potential in the development of current and future automotive systems, enabling new innovations and applications which will redefine the future of mobility.
About Arm
Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and connectivity revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our advanced, energy-efficient processor designs have enabled intelligent computing in more than 150 billion chips and our technologies now securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. In combination with our IoT device, connectivity and data management platform, we are also enabling customers with powerful and actionable business insights that are generating new value from their connected devices and data. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of compute from the chip to the cloud.
All information is provided “as is” and without warranty or representation. This document may be shared freely, attributed and unmodified. Arm is a registered trademark of Arm Limited (or its subsidiaries). All brands or product names are the property of their respective holders. © 1995-2020 Arm Group.
