R-Car/RH850 software platform supports E/E architecture evolution

Evolution of in-vehicle E/E architecture

The automotive industry is facing a drastic transformation. A few years ago, people thought that electrification, networking, and automation, which were still a long way off, are now here. "CASE: Connected, Autonomous, Shared & Service, Electric" was once strongly advocated as a trend of change, but now due to the impact of COVID-19, the S (Sharing & Service) in CASE has lost its momentum. On the contrary, due to the surge in demand for personal mobility services, the P in Personal Mobility Service has replaced the S in CASE and started to shift to PACE.

Whether it is the trend change of "CASE" or "PACE", what drives them is the change in users' expectations of the value of car services. The design of environmental friendliness and safety and confidentiality functions has become the factor for car users to evaluate a "good car". On this basis, people also have higher requirements for comfort and convenience.

In order to better meet the above trends and requirements, the transformation of the automotive electronic/electrical architecture (E/E architecture) is also underway. The current mainstream E/E architecture is a decentralized architecture that configures and uses multiple ECUs according to their purpose. It is expected that future development will realize a "centralized architecture" that centralizes vehicle control, and then further realize a "domain architecture" that divides vehicle control into several domains for collaborative control.

The importance of in-car software

In the future, software will be the key to developing new E/E architecture vehicles. AI that supports autonomous driving technology, xEV motor and battery control, and connection services with the cloud are all inseparable from software. The sharp increase in the scale of in-vehicle software seems to have proved this. Some even predict that the software for Level 5 autonomous driving will exceed 1 billion lines. Developing such a large amount of software quickly and with high quality has become an important condition for shortening the time to market and winning in the competition.

Platform proposal

In order to quickly respond to the above market changes, various automobile manufacturers are committed to the platform development of in-vehicle software, and Toyota's Arene and Volkswagen's vw.os are typical representatives. There are many reasons for car manufacturers to promote platformization. First, they can achieve a unified development environment among many ECUs, thereby improving production capacity; in addition, for different in-vehicle application software, by providing a platform-based standardized API and development environment, the application software can be quickly introduced.

In response to the platform reform of car manufacturers, Renesas has also strengthened the software platform of R-Car and RH850 products. In order to improve customers' production capabilities, the following two aspects have been strengthened:

All-in-one Package: In the past, we provided customers with "point" products of single software. In the future, we will provide customers with "all-in-one" comprehensive services including development environment, AI algorithm development tools, application cases, etc.

Cross-platform: There are many types of ECUs in the car, and different SoCs and operating systems are often used for different purposes. For example, even if the object recognition software used for surround view and autonomous driving is the same, it is distributed in different ECUs in the cockpit and ADAS, resulting in the use of different OS (such as Linux and QNX) and SoC (in our case, the R-Car product series for the cockpit and the R-Car product series for vision/ADAS are the same), and in order to support this demand, they have to be developed separately. In order to solve similar problems and maximize software reuse, we introduced an abstraction layer that can absorb the differences between HW, OS, and middle-layer software, and realized a unified platform across OS and SoC.

Using this software platform in combination with the Renesas R-Car and RH850 Series products will significantly enhance software reusability, improve customers’ productivity, and contribute to faster time to market.

The software platform is under active development and will be released in conjunction with the company's recently launched new SoC products.