Software Development Kit for Automotive MCU

Non-AUTOSAR Software

Although AUTOSAR is a development software architecture with many advantages in code reusability, maintainability, development efficiency and code quality, the use of the AUTOSAR standard requires certain licensing fees and most AUTOSAR software and configuration tools are commercial paid software, requiring additional license authorization. Therefore, only large-scale platform projects, Car OEMs and Tier-1 will fully adopt AUTOSAR architecture software for development to cover the millions of AUTOSAR software costs.

For small projects with limited budgets and non-platforms, non-AUTOSAR software development is a good choice. Although many large customers have their own software libraries accumulated over the years in one or more application developments, in the face of increasingly fast and complex automotive MCU hardware and increasingly complex application functional software requirements, the automotive MCU software development kit (SDK) provided free of charge by chip manufacturers will help customers reduce the time to familiarize themselves with the underlying hardware of the new hardware, reuse middleware software, and allow customers to focus on the development and testing of application layer functional software, improve software development efficiency, and thus shorten the project development cycle.

Software Development Kit (SDK)

The software development kit (SDK) for automotive MCUs is designed to support developers in software development on automotive MCUs. It provides a complete set of tools and libraries for developing, compiling, debugging, and testing applications on automotive MCUs.

The SDK for automotive MCUs usually includes the following main components:

Low-Level Driver Layer (LLD): Provides interfaces with hardware peripherals, including GPIO, UART, SPI, CAN, etc. Developers can use the driver layer to configure and control these peripherals.

Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) or Peripheral Abstraction Layer (PAL): Encapsulates the low-level driver layer (LLD) interface of different peripheral IPs with the same/similar functions, and provides a unified API interface for upper-layer applications or middleware software to shield the register/function differences of peripheral IPs on different hardware platforms, facilitating cross-platform driver code porting.

Operating system (OS): Provides multi-task management, task scheduling, memory management and other functions to support the development of multi-task applications. Common automotive MCU operating systems include AUTOSAR OS and FreeRTOS.

Middleware: provides some commonly used functional modules, such as communication protocol stack, file system, encryption library, etc. Developers can use middleware to simplify the development process and improve development efficiency.

Toolchain: includes compilers, debuggers, emulators and other tools for compiling, debugging and testing applications. Common automotive MCU toolchains include IAR Embedded Workbench, Keil MDK, etc.

Sample code and documentation: Provides some sample code and detailed documentation to help developers quickly get started and understand the functions and usage of automotive MCUs.

The SDK architecture and functions of automotive MCUs can vary depending on the specific chip manufacturer and application requirements. Developers can choose the appropriate SDK according to their needs and develop according to the documentation and sample code provided by the SDK.