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Today, nearly half of a vehicle’s development cost comes
from on-board electronics. AUTOSAR’s Release 4.0,
launched in December 2009, facilitates the faster design
and development of vehicle electronics.
The core partners of the AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System
Architecture) Development Partnership signed a development
agreement in late 2009 which ushers in Phase III of the partnership,
lasting from 2010 to 2012. This coincides with a wider acceptance
of the AUTOSAR standard across the globe as automotive
designers race to develop new electronic content for vehicles.
The AUTOSAR Development Partnership was founded in
2003/2004 by the BMW Group, Bosch, Continental, DaimlerChrysler,
Ford, GM, PSA, Siemens VDO, Toyota and Volkswagen in an effort
to establish an open standard for automotive E/E architecture. The
standard will serve as a basic infrastructure for the management
of functions within both future applications and standard software
modules. The AUTOSAR partnership has expanded
“
The new release provides
all the features that ECUs
of the next generation
of cars will need.
”
Simon Fürst, spokesperson of the
AUTOSAR Development Partnership.
to include a large number of OEM manufacturers and
Tier One automotive suppliers, and to date, more than 160
companies worldwide have joined the AUTOSAR partnership.
“AUTOSAR Release 4.0 provides many new features for the
developers enabling them to realize even more complex and
higher integrated functionality on a single ECU,” says Simon Fürst,
spokesperson of the AUTOSAR Development Partnership.
Fürst explains that because the basic architecture of Release
4.0 is a logical development of the well established architecture of
Release 3.0, AUTOSAR-based applications will easily migrate to
the new release while benefitting from new concepts like memory
partitioning and enhancements on the communication stack which
includes support for the FlexRay ISO Transport Protocol.
In addition, the descriptions have been massively extended
enabling an even smoother headway in the XML based
AUTOSAR methodology.
“We expect that ECU development based in Release 4.0 will
start in 2010 with the availability of basic software implementations
and updates of AUTOSAR tooling,” says Fürst.
Taking ECUs
into the future
By Lenny Case
One of the challenges the AUTOSAR partnership is facing
is the backward compatibility of Release 4.0. The investments
automotive designers have made Release 3.0 reusable. AUTOSAR
is currently developing compatibility statements on the different
levels of the standard. According to Fürst, Release 4.0 promises to
improve methodology and templates and mark the transition from
Phase II to Phase III.
“The harmonization of ECU configuration parameters,
enhancements on measurements and calibration, the rework of
the ECU Resource Template and further alignment with the Field
Bus Exchange Format (FIBEX) standard play a key role in the
improvements,” said Fürst in October 2009 at the International
Congress ‘Electronic Systems for Vehicles’, hosted by the
Association of German Engineers.
Release 4.0 contains a large set of application interfaces
standardized by AUTOSAR for all five vehicle domains – body and
comfort, powertrain, chassis, occupant and pedestrian
safety, as well as human machine interface (HMI)
and telematics.
For the new standard, AUTOSAR chose
the approach to validate it before its release.
As Release 4.0 is a partial extension of the
existing architecture, the results of the
validation will already be incorporated.
Automotive Industries caught up
with Simon Fürst, spokesperson of
AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System
ARchitecture) and asked how the
standard has managed to increase its
popularity from Europe across the globe.
Fürst: More and more companies worldwide
recognize that AUTOSAR is the key technology
regarding infrastructure software for automotive systems.
For example, all major ECU suppliers have AUTOSAR on their
roadmap and most of them already offer products based on Release
3.0/3.1. Since the advantages of AUTOSAR are so convincing, we
will see many car model launches with AUTOSAR ECUs on board in
the near future. The AUTOSAR standard enables OEMs and suppliers
to reduce development time and offers the possibility of savings.
AI: What are some of the fundamental differences
between R3.0 and R4.0? And how will this help push the
popularity of the AUTOSAR platform globally?
Fürst: As Release 4.0 is a partial extension of the existing
architecture, the results of the validation have already been
incorporated. In addition, the existing releases will be maintained.
Release 4.0 contains a remarkable number of new and unique
features. The new concepts introduced in AUTOSAR Release 4.0
are adding technical and functional improvements and extensions
to the areas of functional safety, architecture, communication
stack and templates. The new release provides all the features
that ECUs of the next generation of cars will need.
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