Cognizant Mobility shows at ELIV 2024 how vehicle manufacturers can reduce development costs
How Cognizant Mobility's Virtual Embedded Pipeline allows vehicle manufacturers and system suppliers to save costs in development and testing, reduce chip dependencies and bring better tested customer functions to market will be demonstrated live by Cognizant Mobility at ELIV 2024 in Bonn from October 16-17. The focus will be on reusable and quickly deployable modules that enable hardware-independent and virtual development of new as well as existing vehicle functions. Visitors can experience the speed advantage of this new approach compared to conventional, hardware-based development and functional tests live in a demo.
With virtual development and the consistent use of cloud-native technologies, Cognizant Mobility is tackling a fundamental problem in today's vehicle development: Functions are usually inextricably linked to their hardware and are therefore slow to update during a vehicle's life cycle. Furthermore, the use of specialized chips and their peripherals ensures a high level of dependency on individual providers. The opposite approach is called SDV (software-defined vehicle), in which ideally as many (customer) features as possible share a central computing unit instead of being tied to specific control units. The advantages of Cognizant Mobility's virtual development pipeline: hardware dependencies are greatly reduced, while development speed is increased and costs for expensive testing hardware are reduced. Cognizant Mobility's virtual development pipeline ensures that vehicle manufacturers can respond to this paradigm shift.
Virtualization now also works with legacy functions
Cognizant Mobility's virtualization approach is based on the SOAFEE framework and the ARM design for processor architectures. On the one hand, this is intended to offer complete virtualization support and, on the other, to guarantee maximum compatibility of all processor chips used. Cognizant Mobility demonstrates that this can be achieved not only with completely new vehicle functions according to the AUTOSAR Adaptive Standard, but also with classic, older software architectures that do not yet follow the ARM architecture model, using an ECU from Agco. The control unit used in agricultural machinery technology works with a microprocessor from the Aurix family and is an example of very complex functions already in use on the market today. The development pipeline also provides a time and cost-saving virtual representation for products that are developed in such “legacy systems”.
Visible head start in the testing of vehicle functions
Before newly developed software is integrated or “deployed” on hardware, it must be fully tested. This is where the advantages of the development pipeline are particularly noticeable, as the integrated virtualization support enables developers to test all functions, even if the required hardware does not yet exist. This takes place at such an early stage of development that potential errors can be rectified early enough before they cause major costs. The previously required testing hardware, i.e. special hardware that is supposed to test the newly developed function in conjunction with its control unit, can also be cut by more than half thanks to virtualization.
“By integrating AUTOSAR Classic and non-ARM-based architectures into our development pipeline, we can show that the classic, existing functions of car manufacturers and system suppliers can also benefit from virtualization. This not only saves them time and money, but also increases their test coverage,” confirms Jens Schmidt, Head of Embedded Software at Cognizant Mobility.