Three team for configurable zonal controllers
Green Hills Software, STMicroelectronics and Cetitec are developing a configurable in-vehicle communications platform for automotive zonal controllers.
Cetitec, a Porsche company and a software specialist for the development of connectivity and networking systems, is using an RTOS from Green Hills and the ST Stellar microcontrollers for the zonal controller for software defined vehicles.
A significant number of the ECUs in currently decentralized or domain-based architectures will be consolidated into a small number of high-performance compute units combined with zonal controllers. This zonal-based centralized architecture has increased requirements for performance, safety and security of the zonal controllers and necessitates new in-vehicle networking solutions.
The Green Hills µ-velOSity real-time operating system (RTOS) will be used with the Cetitec networking stacks, gateways and routing frameworks on the Stellar P and G microcontrollers
Cetitec is developing a demonstration zonal controller with its Gateway and the Cetitec Distributed Communications Framework (CDCF) to bridge the gap between automotive-specific protocols such as CAN, LIN, Ethernet and a service-oriented software architecture, where Ethernet is often used as the vehicle networking technology.
The Cetitec Gateway is highly configurable, has the ability to update the routing configuration post-build without recompiling the firmware, and supports all standard automotive networking protocols.
The ST Stellar Data Move Engine (DME) runs on one of the ARM Cortex-M4 cores present in the Stellar MCUs performing the communication routing functionality which offloads the main Cortex-R52 running the Green Hills µ-velOSity RTOS.
The communication between the cores is achieved by using the CDCF running both on top of µ-velOSity on the R52 core and on the Stellar DME core, allowing the Cetitec Gateway to effectively communicate with ECU applications running on µ-velOSity.
This component abstracts away the functionality of native drivers and provides full environment abstraction for applications running on μ-velOSity.
ST’s Stellar Integration MCUs provide a 10x increase in performance compared to previous generations of vehicle MCUs and adds required features such as extensible memory and OTA (over-the-air update) support, allowing OEMs to update and add new features during the lifetime of the vehicle. The Green Hills MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) fully integrates with the Stellar Studio development environment, making the development of applications faster and easier to debug.
The demonstrator includes support for the Green Hills ASIL-certified MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) and C/C++ compilers which increase developer productivity while enabling developers to shorten the time to find and fix bugs and optimize applications on multicore processors. The MULTI IDE’s event viewer and TimeMachine back-in-time debugger make it easy to quickly find and fix difficult bugs and performance bottlenecks while preventing future software problems in deployed systems.
“Our collaboration with Cetitec and Green Hills on the Stellar platform brings safe and efficient solutions to our customers. They will enable them to stay at the forefront of the shift towards more sustainable, software-defined vehicles of the future,” said Davide Santo, ST Automotive Microcontroller Business Unit Director.
“As SDV architectures are being fast-tracked by OEMs, platforms that reduce the time to ECU/feature integration while efficiently managing communications are key enablers for reducing the cost to develop and the time to deploy,” said Dan Mender, VP Business Development at Green Hills Software. “Our collaboration with STMicroelectronics and Cetitec is foundational to enabling efficient, scalable and configurable communications solutions for next-generation SDV domain/zonal controller ECUs.”
“We believe that providing a great infrastructure for easy application development is paramount for the future OEMs to be able to make the SDV a great success. Cooperation with our partners is an important step to achieve this,” said Dr. Michael Back, CEO of Cetitec, sharing his vision of the future.
Green Hills, ST, and Cetitec will demonstrate the zonal controller platform at Embedded World 2024 this week in Germany.
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