1. Virtualization
The next trend in the automotive industry

2. About me
● A product owner in Opensynergy GmbH.
● 7+ years of experience in embedded software development
and the automotive software domain.
● Enthusiastic about investing and financial markets.
Ahmed Abdelfattah

3. Agenda
● Definitions
● Virtualization in the cloud
○ The concept of virtualization has been around much longer than you think
○ State of the art
● Moving to automotive
○ Traditional E/E architecture of the car
○ Limitations of the traditional architecture
○ The car of the future is software defined
● Borrowing the solution from the cloud
○ Architecture redesign
○ Challenges facing the modern architecture
○ COQOS Micro SDK

4. Definitions
● A Hypervisor is a software that enables
running multiple guest OSes on the
same physical hardware
● Each guest OS runs on a Virtual
Machine

5. Virtualization in the Cloud

6. The Concept of Virtualization has been around much longer than you
think
● In 1972, IBM released the
first version of the VM OS
family to run on the
mainframe System/370.
● The VM/370 provided a
virtual cpu, virtual storage,
and virtual devices for each
VM.

7. A snippet from “Introduction to VM/370 First Edition” published in 1972

8. State of the Art
Source: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html
AWS Nitro: Near-metal performance
Azure Auto Scale: Scalability on demand
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/autoscale-overview

9. Moving to Automotive ….

10. Traditional E/E Architecture of the Car
● One ECU (Electronic Control Unit) per
feature.
● ECUs communicate over a slow bus
(mostly CAN).
● Central Gateway
● The car manufacturer relies on many
suppliers.
Nolte, T., Hansson, H., & Bello, L. (2005). Automotive communications past, current and future. In
Proceedings of 10th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation
(ETFA’05) (pp. 985–992). IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.

11. Limitations of the Traditional Architecture
● Heavy weight up to 80 Kg
● Up to 5 Km of wiring harness length
● Increased software complexity puts the architecture under pressure
○ Autonomous driving
○ Electrification introduces new electronics
○ Mobility
○ Connectivity
Sources:
● Zonal EE Architecture:Towards a Fully Automotive Ethernet–Based Vehicle Infrastructure Jochen
Klaus-WagenbrennerSeptember 24, 2019
● McKinsey & Company Analysis, IEEE "This Car Runs on Code"; HAWK; Automotive Electronics Initiative

12. The car or the future is software defined
Source: Ronald Berger Strategy
Consultants

13. The car or the future is software defined
Source:
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizat
ions/million-lines-of-code/

14. Borrowing Solutions from the
Cloud ...

15. Architecture Redesign
Domain Architecture
● Consolidation of features into
fewer powerful ECUs: Domain
Controllers
● Ethernet backbone
● Reduces cost and weight
P802.1DG – TSN Profile for Automotive In-Vehicle Ethernet Communications
March 2019
Zinner, Brand, Hopf, Continental AG

16. Architecture Redesign
Zonal Architecture
● Further consolidation of features
● Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
● A step toward a fully centralized
architecture
● Could bear savings of 50% or more to
wiring harness length
Source: Zonal EE Architecture:Towards a Fully Automotive Ethernet–Based Vehicle Infrastructure Jochen
Klaus-WagenbrennerSeptember 24, 2019

17. Challenges facing the Modern Architectures
● Consolidation of software features into a single ECU complicates an
already complicated development life cycle
○ could take up to 5 years for a single ECU production project
○ Most of time is spent to address safety requirements
● A major concern by OEMs is mixing software with different safety
criticality levels (ASIL levels)
● Security is another major concern
● Suppliers adopt virtualization technology to addresses these concerns

18. COQOS Micro SDK: The real-time hypervisor
● The solution from OpenSynergy to address
the challenges faced by OEMs.
● Runs on automotive microcontrollers.
● Very thin layer
● Provides memory protection and temporal
isolation
● Ensures freedom from interference
● Highly static architecture to face security
threats
● Hardware-assisted virtualization
Source: OpenSynergy

19. Q&A