engineering, AUTOSAR - Automotive Industries

innovation
AUTOSAR release 4.0
speeds up design By: Lenny Case
Members of the AUTomotive Open System Architecture
(AUTOSAR) Development Partnership presented their
methods and solutions for an open, standardized software
architecture at a joint booth at the electronica 2010 held
from November 9 to 12 in Munich, Germany. At the centre of
the AUTOSAR presentation was the Release 4.0, launched
in December 2009, - which marked the end of phase two.
Release 4.0 contains a large number of technical and functional
improvements to functional safety, architecture, communication
stack, methodology and templates, and application interfaces.
A major focus of the development partnership was on
maturing methodology and templates. Some of the
upgrades in Release 4.0 included the harmonization
Stefan Bunzel,
spokesperson for
AUTOSAR
of ECU configuration parameters, the enhancements
on measurements and calibration, the rework of the
ECU Resource Template as well as the further alignment
with the Field Bus Exchange Format or FIBEX standard.
According to Stefan Bunzel, spokesperson for the AUTOSAR
Partnership, AUTOSAR’s Release 4.0 facilitates the faster design
and development of vehicle electronics. As the basic architecture
of Release 4.0 is a logical development of the well-established
architecture of Release 3.x, AUTOSAR-based applications will easily
migrate to the new release while benefiting from new concepts like
memory partitioning, or enhancements on the communication
stack, like support for the FlexRay ISO Transport Protocol.
AUTOSAR has selected about 50 technical concepts which will
be developed and incorporated in the Release 4.1 until the end of
2012. This selective enhancement aims at achieving backwards
compatibility with former releases.
The AUTOSAR partnership was founded in 2003/2004 by the
BMW Group, Bosch, Continental, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM,
PSA, Siemens VDO, Toyota and Volkswagen to develop an open,
standardized software architecture for the automotive industry.
The growing importance of AUTOSAR is proven by its growing
global prominence. “More and more companies worldwide recognize
that AUTOSAR is the key technology regarding infrastructure software
for automotive systems. The results and the success of the second
Open Conference in Tokyo in May 2010 proved that AUTOSAR
has been gaining momentum in Asia, particularly in Japan.
The event fully underlined its motto of AUTOSAR as a
global standard,” says Bunzel.
This global prominence was confirmed
in October 2010, when Indian firm KPIT
Cummins Infosystems announced the
availability of a software package based on the
Herstellerinitiative Software recommendation
for Scalable AUTOSAR Stack supporting 16
bit AUTOSAR R3.1 Solution.
There has been significant growth in the need for
standardization of automotive software because of an
increase of ECUs in cars. However, programs became too
large for the standardized hardware components, and OEMs
requested a solution with a smaller memory requirement, like the 16bit
microcontroller. AUTOSAR meets these requirements by optimizing the
code size according to recommended guidelines by HIS.
Automotive Industries (AI) caught up with Stefan Bunzel,
spokesperson of the AUTOSAR Partnership, and asked
how successful electronica 2010 was from an AUTOSAR
perspective.
bunzel: electronica has established its position as an
important meeting point for the global electronics industry. The
high number of international visitors and exhibitors confirmed the
leading character of this trade fair.
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