Renesas Electronics Launches First Automotive ECU Virtualization Solution Platform

Renesas Electronics Launches First Automotive ECU Virtualization Solution Platform to Enable Secure Integration of Multiple Applications in Regional ECUs

Ready-to-use development platform includes Renesas high-performance automotive-grade RH850/U2x MCU and ETAS’ RTA-HVR software

Beijing, China, April 26, 2022 - Renesas Electronics, a global supplier of semiconductor solutions, today announced the launch of an integrated automotive-grade ECU virtualization platform - RH850/U2x MCU and ETAS's RTA-HVR software , enabling automotive electronic system designers to integrate multiple applications into a single ECU (electronic control unit) to achieve safe, reliable and relatively independent from each other to avoid mutual interference. This solution enables users to adopt a new electronic/electrical architecture (E/E architecture) and use MCU-based regional ECUs to support multiple logical ECUs on one physical ECU. Migrating to a new platform can maximize the reuse of existing technologies, reduce development workload, achieve lower power consumption, and reduce the weight and complexity of wiring harnesses in vehicles.

The ECU Virtualization Solution Platform combines Renesas' RH850/U2x MCU with ETAS' RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor designed for microcontrollers with hardware virtualization support. The platform builds a ready-to-use demonstration environment, including pre-configured embedded software, tools, and an interactive demonstration environment for RH850/U2x MCUs, helping automotive users to explore design options extensively and develop their own regional ECU projects.

“The transition to a regional architecture changes the functional role allocation between the central ECU and each regional ECU, and also increases the design burden,” said Tetsuo Yoshida, Senior Director of the Automotive Digital Product Marketing Division at Renesas Electronics Corporation. “In addition to the high performance achieved by the RH850/U2x MCUs, I believe this new ECU virtualization solution platform will bring our customers the advantage of easy and fast development of advanced systems with built-in functional safety and cybersecurity features.”

“Thanks to our collaboration with Renesas, we are able to leverage the hardware capabilities of the RH850/U2x MCUs to complement our best-in-class AUTOSAR OS technology and deliver a high-performance, low-cost embedded hypervisor for automotive applications,” said Nigel Tracey, Vice President of Vehicle Operating Systems at ETAS.

RH850/U2x MCUs, including RH850/U2A and RH850/U2B, integrate multiple ASIL D-compliant software partitions with a rich set of embedded hardware to build a cost-effective and high-performance solution for the next generation of regional/integrated ECUs. These MCUs are designed for regional applications to reduce the number of components in the ECU and minimize the cost of redesign. RH850/U2x MCUs include hardware support for virtualization hypervisors, QoS quality of service (RH850/U2B only) support, functional safety and network security features to avoid interference. A high-performance NoC (network on chip) structure ensures the correct real-time behavior of each integrated application.

ETAS RTA-HVR software works with the hardware virtualization capabilities of the Renesas RH850U2x MCU to provide one or more virtual machines (VMs). The VMs are separated in space (using the RH850U2x memory protection unit and guard functions) and time (using the RTA-HVR virtual machine scheduler) to meet stringent automotive functional safety and cybersecurity requirements. RTA-HVR provides a toolkit for building Virtual Device Extensions (VDEs). Each virtual device consists of one or more virtual CPU cores, a subset of the device memory space, and a set of peripherals.

RH850/U2x Regional ECU Starter Kit

The unique RH850/U2x Regional ECU Starter Kit provides a "ready-to-use" configuration of RTA-HVR as part of the solution, demonstrating different VM configurations (single core, multi-core and multi-VM per core). User software images are also created for each configured VM, including bare metal and user images using the RTA-CAR Classic AUTOSAR solution from ETAS. Virtual device instances are available for peripheral device sharing and inter-VM networking ("Virtual CAN").

In addition, a PC-based application enables users to observe and interact with the virtual machine at runtime. The PC application supports a variety of operations, including:

• Trigger exceptions in the system at runtime to explore the behavior of the virtual machine in situations such as memory conflicts, timing overflows, etc.

• Using the no-wait OTA feature of RH850/U2x, you can update another VM while another VM is running.

• Exploring the performance impact of alternative VM switching mechanisms

• Enables developers to see the impact of hardware QoS features

Availability

Renesas' ECU virtualization software platform, including the RH850/U2x Regional ECU Starter Kit, will be available in late May.