Software defines cars, who will "support" the software?

As "hardware convergence, software definition" has become the consensus of the industry, software has become a key factor in determining the upper limit of smart vehicles, and its proportion in the entire vehicle has also continued to increase. According to Deloitte's calculations, it is expected that software costs will account for 50% of the vehicle BOM from less than 10% currently by 2030. When half of the body components become software, the automotive industry's voice will undoubtedly tilt towards the software field. The ability of enterprises to screen and judge core technologies will become the key to winning in the era of software-defined cars.

Zhao Fuquan, the lifelong honorary president of the World Federation of Societies of Automotive Engineers (FISITA), once pointed out: The essence of software-defined cars is the company’s judgment of future core technologies: “In analogy with the black, white and gray boxes in the traditional automotive hardware field, the black box is bought The white box is a core technology that must be mastered, while the gray box is a technology that can be understood and defined but does not necessarily have to be built by oneself.”

In order to identify the "black, white, and gray boxes" in automotive software, researchers need to start from a global perspective and create a "one-stop winning march map" for the industry's key pain points.

Image source: Guoke Jishi

Guoke Basic Stone is one of the mapmakers. It jointly compiled and released the "Automotive Software Panorama (2022)" with Chongqing Zhongke Automotive Software Innovation Center , aiming at "automotive software layered architecture and automotive software full life cycle development." Analysis was carried out in four major sections: tool chain, automotive software ecosystem line (players and products), and automotive software standard line (domestic and foreign industry standards). When talking about the purpose of mapping, Sun Deli, senior director of Guoke Basic Stone Products, said: "We hope to work together with upstream and downstream players in the industry to understand the current position and better solve problems."

"Collaborative industry" is the original intention of Guoke Basic Stone. In the name of "foundation", Guoke Basic Stone is determined to be the "founder" of automotive software. As Sun Deli emphasized: As an explorer of the automotive software panorama, Guoke Basic Stone is committed to empowering customers from the automotive infrastructure level and accelerating the implementation of automotive intelligence.

Image source: Guoke Jishi

Software defines cars, who will "support" the software?

At present, the product form and business model of the automobile industry are undergoing drastic changes: First, automobiles have shifted from manufacturing-based manned vehicles to technology-intensive mobile terminals; secondly, the profit model of automobile companies has changed from "one-time sales" to "pre-sales". "Hardware + paid software unlocking", the commonality between the two is the increase in the proportion of software and technical complexity, which has further led to changes in the automotive software architecture.

"Panorama" pointed out that under the signal-oriented software architecture, software and hardware are highly coupled, and the development and operation of software are highly dependent on hardware. It can be said that "one move affects the whole body." This is not only not conducive to the improvement of development efficiency, but also will Causes obstacles to later changes and upgrades. As a result, the service-oriented SOA architecture emerged. This type of architecture can implement various functions of the car in the form of subscription services. Services can access each other and be combined and spliced ​​like "stacked blocks", which is not only more flexible. , and can also complete more complex functional scenarios.

The fundamental purpose of architecture conversion is to support more complex application layer functional software. As a necessary "bridge" between the application layer and the underlying hardware, the "foundation-building" role of automotive basic software has gradually become more prominent, and its market size has also increased with the trend of intelligentization. A rising tide lifts all boats. According to the forecast of Yiou Think Tank , the scale of China's smart car basic software market will reach 14.25 billion yuan in 2025.

Under the SOA software architecture, the underlying basic software can be mainly divided into the operating system and the running middleware layer, which provides the running and development environment for functional software and is the "lubricant" for users to run the vehicle. Especially as cars shift from distributed E/E architecture to multi-core domain control architecture, it is necessary to ensure the compatibility of heterogeneous cross-domain platforms; improve the efficiency of autonomous driving task scheduling; provide high-performance and high-security data communication; and realize cross-platform Software reuse and migration require the support of operating systems and middleware.

Image source: Guoke Jishi

Faced with SOA, Cuguang middleware helps speed up software development and upgrades

To this end, Guoke Jishi launched the Jiguang middleware adaptive software platform. According to Sun Deli, this platform mainly provides six functions:

First, it provides rich service abstract interfaces and middleware compatible interfaces. The southbound provides middleware architecture adaptive interfaces, which are compatible with AutoSAR and ROS2 middleware service frameworks; the northbound provides unified and standardized vehicle-level abstract interfaces to improve the migration of application software. efficiency.

Second, provide strong service governance capabilities, provide customized, comprehensive high-performance service governance components, solve service dependency issues under SOA architecture and improve software stability and robustness, allowing automotive software developers to pay more attention to business realization .

Third, it provides deterministic scheduling and deterministic execution technology for real-time tasks. Sun Deli said that the core principle of this function is to achieve deterministic scheduling of real-time tasks based on configurable user thread priority scheduling strategies, triggered/non-triggered/round-robin scheduling strategies, reducing the number of threads and context switching.

Image source: Guoke Jishi

Fourth, it provides high-performance data communication and is compatible with multiple communication methods. As L3 enters the implementation stage, the number of sensors on cars will increase, and the requirements for data transmission will become higher and higher. For this reason, Chuguang middleware can provide cross-domain communication solutions based on DDS. Combined with Cornerstone OS, the packet sending and receiving mechanism of Ethernet and shared memory is optimized from the operating system layer, which can meet the jitter (20-80μs) and delay performance of hundreds of microseconds, as well as high throughput close to the physical line speed (950Mbps). ).

Sun Deli added that Guoke Basic Stone can not only provide complete full-domain communication solutions; when resources are limited, it can also provide corresponding software products: including lightweight DDS, intra-domain and inter-domain ECU and SOC communication solutions , to solve the customized needs of customers in multiple scenarios.

Fifth, provide containers that support the isolated operation of critical security systems, solve mutual interference between applications, ensure safe and stable operation of applications, solve large-scale migration and deployment problems between cloud-based and car-side domain controllers, and shorten the deployment cycle.

Sixth, provide enhanced Safety & Security base. Based on the SecOC mechanism, intra-domain/inter-domain communication is implemented to achieve reliable transmission of information security; based on the E2E mechanism, end-to-end functional security communication guarantee is achieved.

In addition, to improve software development efficiency, we must also pay attention to the middleware layer and development tool chain that are more hidden than the operating system layer. As Sun Deli said: "If a worker wants to do his job well, he must first sharpen his tools." If SOA middleware mainly solves the problem of user experience when the car is running, then the development tool chain is aimed at the efficiency of engineering personnel during development. question.

Cuguang tool chain, born to simplify SOA development

In fact, the introduction of SOA not only increases the proportion of software in the car body, but also changes the development method from "V-mode development" to "cloud native agile development", which puts higher requirements on the tool chain from the design and development dimensions. Sun Deli pointed out: "Even if there is good software, if there is a lack of corresponding tool chains, the complexity, cost, and efficiency of development will be greatly affected."

In this regard, Guoke Cushi provides a cloud-native-based tool chain - Cuguang Tool Chain, which makes the development and maintenance of smart car SOA software easier. This tool chain mainly consists of three parts: cloud design space, cloud development space and cloud debugging space, and is aimed at "coordinating software development and management processes", "realizing synchronous development across teams and regions under complex processes", and "rapidly Provide solutions to four types of problems: "locating and troubleshooting vulnerabilities in SOA services" and "the SOA design process is difficult to standardize and the results are difficult to reuse".

Image source: Guoke Jishi

"In short, we hope to make software development for smart cars simple." Sun Deli said.

Every step of Guoke Basic Stone's strategy closely revolves around this original vision. In early February this year, Guoke Basic Stone's other major layout for basic software-Cuguang Operating System has officially released its overall plan and Open source plan, and will open source Cuguang Linux used in the smart car cockpit domain and autonomous driving domain. Adhering to the concept of "technological innovation drive + ecological open source and openness", we will make efforts to solve the core technical problems of basic automotive software.