Renesas Unveils Automotive ECU Virtualization Platform
The ECU virtualization solution platform combines Renesas’ RH850/U2x MCUs with ETAS’ RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor designed for microcontrollers with hardware virtualization support.
Renesas Electronics Corporation has launched an integrated automotive ECU Virtualization Platform that enables designers to integrate multiple applications into a single ECU (Electronic Control Unit) that are safely and securely separated from each other to avoid interference.
The solution enables customers to adopt new electrical-electronic (E/E) architectures using MCU-based zone ECUs supporting multiple logical ECUs on one physical ECU.
“The transition to a zone architecture increases the design burden by changing the functional role assignments between the central ECU and each zone ECU,” said Satoshi Yoshida, Senior Director, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas. “In addition to the high performance provided by the RH850/U2x MCUs, I am confident that this new ECU Virtualization Solution Platform will give our customers the advantage of easy, fast development of advanced systems with built-in safety and security features.”
“Working together with Renesas, we were able to leverage the HW capabilities of the RH850/U2x MCUs to deliver a high performance, low overhead, an embedded hypervisor for automotive applications that complements class-leading AUTOSAR OS technologies,” said Nigel Tracey, Vice President of Vehicle Operating Systems at ETAS.
Migration to the new platform maximizes legacy reuse with minimum development effort to leverage gains in lower power consumption and reduced wiring harness weight and complexity in the vehicle.
Renesas ECU virtualization solution platform combines Renesas’ RH850/U2x MCUs with ETAS’ RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor designed for microcontrollers with hardware virtualization support.
This platform provides a ready-to-use demonstrator environment comprising pre-configured embedded software, tools and an interactive demonstrator environment for RH850/U2x MCUs, allowing automotive customers to explore design choices for the development of their Zone-ECU projects.
The RH850/U2x MCUs including RH850/U2A and RH850/U2B deliver a cost-efficient and high-performance solution for next-generation Zone-/Integration-ECUs due to a rich set of embedded hardware that realizes the integration of multiple ASIL D-compliant software partitions.
The MCUs are specifically designed for Zone-applications targeting reduced ECU component count with minimal re-engineering overhead.
RH850/U2x MCUs include features such as Hypervisor hardware support, Quality-of-Service (RH850/U2B only) support, Safety & Security functions to enable freedom from interference, and a high-performance NoC (Network-on-Chip) structure to ensure proper real-time behavior of the individual integrated applications.
