Arm partners with Panasonic Automotive Systems for SDV architecture

08 Nov 2024, 10:19 by Caroline Hayes · Electronics Weekly.com

At the Arm Tech Symposia, in Tokyo, this week, Arm announced a partnership with Panasonic to standardise the automotive architecture for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), with a future-proofed software stack.

The partners have demonstrated a proof-of-concept using PAS’s open-source remote GPU technology, Unified HMI, to implement a Display Zonal architecture built on Arm which distributes GPU loads from the central ECU (engine control unit) to multiple zonal ECUs. This reduces both heat generation and harness weight without altering applications running on the central ECU. Using the Mali-G78AE GPU of zonal ECUs allocates dedicated hardware resources to different workloads. Standardised interfaces between software stack and the hypervisors and chipsets on which they run will accelerate adoption of technology as new generations are introduced, Arm added.

PAS’s vSkipGen operates on Arm Neoverse-based cloud servers. Maintaining the same Arm CPU architecture and VirtIO device virtualisation framework, will ensure full environmental parity between cloud virtual hardware and automotive hardware, explained Arm.

There will also be work on expanding the VirtIO standardisation to applications beyond the cockpit use cases based on Android Automotive and Automotive Grade Linux. Broader VirtIO standards could apply to standardised interfaces for RTOS so that ADAS software is not hardware-dependent.

Estimates put the value of the global SDV market at $35.6bn in 2022, expected to rise to $210.88bn by 2032 – a CAGR of 19.4% (Precedence Research)

Both companies are members of SOAFEE (Scalable Open Architecture For the Embedded Edge), an alliance which is across the automotive and software industries working to develop AI-enabled SDVs.