The Future of Automotive Software Development | Why Virtual Platforms are Key

Automotive software development is going through a period of radical change, with software defined vehicles (SDVs) as the catalyst. In the past, hardware was designed, tested, and verified for safety. Software was then written and tested, and then hardware and software were tested together for a sub-component.  However, there is now a shift to a zonal architecture with centralized compute in the middle of the vehicle. 

Yet standards like ISO 26262 certification and safety documentation still outline that requirements, from implementation to testing, must be mapped. This needs to be done at a systematic level, for the hardware and the software. But the shift to zonal architecture means no longer viewing small discrete blocks. Software engineers must look at the entire vehicle architecture as they write code, so the complexity of maintaining safety has dramatically increased.  And with a software-defined vehicle, software and hardware are being co-designed and co-developed.  Everything must be reconsidered, from team and process organization to development and testing.  

The traditional DevOps process in automotive software development has meant a long wait and often odd-hour time slot for testing software in a physical lab. Provided you are located in the same physical place as that lab. The result is a team that’s not able to develop as much, or as quickly, as they need to because of long waits and limited time, which also means running less tests. 

Software-defined vehicles are complicating this process even further, since when you're building an SDV frequent tests are critical. Every model should be tested, but so should every trim level of every model, as well as every configuration option of every vehicle of every trim level. Not only for this model year, but for the next 15 years since new regulations like UNR 155 around security and safety require automakers to provide updates for 15 years after manufacturing.  Clearly physical testing is no longer a viable option, and shifting to virtualization is critical. But a virtual platform environment for automotive software development must be robust: 

1. 1. Scalable - able to handle hundreds of millions of lines of code and support certification testing at scale, in parallel. For example, if it takes an hour to boot the OS, and there are 10,000 tests to run, that’s 10,000 hours just booting before testing. 
2. Accessible - enable feedback, not the domain of one team. It must be a collaborative tool that enables the software team writing the code to interact with the testing and verification team doing the certification testing. Enable visibility, with integrations, for highly distributed teams. 
3. Accurate - perform the proper behavior. It must run the code using actual drivers and actual code paths. It has to have software and system level accuracy, byte and interface accuracy.

But today’s virtual prototypes are not sufficient. Traditional virtual prototypes can take months or sometimes even years to develop, which means by the time you get them to real silicon they are no longer useful. They also run hundreds of times slower than the real thing and don’t represent actual behavior.  

Corellium Atlas is different, it dramatically accelerates development by removing the delays associated with replicating complex test failures across globally distributed teams. With a fully virtualized environment, developers no longer need to collect the right physical hardware and properly configure it. This streamlined approach reduces downtime, accelerates debugging, and ensures faster iterations, driving more efficient and agile development cycles. 

For more information, watch the full webinar, and see the demo of Corellium Atlas in action, or start your free trial today.