Green Hills Software, STMicroelectronics and Cetitec Collaborate on Delivering Configurable In-Vehicle Communications Platform for Automotive Zonal Controllers

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Apr 09, 2024, 02:03 ET

Fully integrated solution manages communication for consolidation of ECUs (electronic control units) in zonal controllers as part of next-generation Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) architectures

NUREMBERG, Germany, April 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Green Hills Software, the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security, together with STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, and Cetitec, a Porsche company and leading software specialist for the development of connectivity and networking system solutions, today announced a collaboration to deliver an integrated and configurable communications platform for use in zonal controllers for the centralized EE vehicle architecture of the SDV. This solution consists of Green Hills' µ-velOSity™ real-time operating system (RTOS), ST's Stellar Integration MCU platform, and Cetitec's advanced networking stacks, gateways and routing frameworks.

The automotive industry is currently aligned to transition to the Software-Defined Vehicle which requires a change in the vehicles' EE architecture. A significant number of the ECUs in currently decentralized or domain-based architectures will be consolidated into a small number of high-performance compute units combined with zonal controllers. This zonal-based centralized architecture has increased requirements for performance, safety and security of the zonal controllers and necessitates new in-vehicle networking solutions.

ST's Stellar Integration MCUs provide a 10x increase in performance compared to previous generations of vehicle MCUs and adds required features such as extensible memory and OTA (over-the-air update) support, allowing OEMs to update and add new features during the lifetime of the vehicle. Running on ST's latest Stellar MCUs, Green Hills' µ-velOSity RTOS benefits from access to the latest hardware updates of the Stellar P and G microcontrollers. The Green Hills MULTI^® integrated development environment (IDE) fully integrates with the Stellar Studio development environment, making the development of applications faster and easier to debug.

Based on this platform, Cetitec provides a demonstrator consisting of the Cetitec Gateway and the Cetitec Distributed Communications Framework (CDCF). These communications solutions bridge the gap between automotive-specific protocols such as CAN, LIN, Ethernet and a service-oriented software architecture, where Ethernet is often used as the vehicle networking technology. Cetitec Gateway is highly configurable, has the ability to update the routing configuration post-build without recompiling the firmware, and supports all standard automotive networking protocols. The ST Stellar Data Move Engine (DME) runs on one of the Arm^® Cortex^®-M4 cores present in the Stellar MCUs performing the communication routing functionality which offloads the main Stellar MCU core (Cortex-R52) running the Green Hills µ-velOSity RTOS. The communication between the cores is achieved by using the CDCF. This component is running both on top of µ-velOSity on the R52 core and on the Stellar DME core, allowing the Cetitec Gateway to effectively communicate with ECU applications running on µ-velOSity. This component abstracts away the functionality of native drivers and provides full environment abstraction for applications running on μ-velOSity. At the heart of the μ-velOSity RTOS is an efficient and reliable kernel with a minimal footprint and easy-to-use API. μ-velOSity enables applications, middleware, and drivers to run outside of kernel memory space and offers optional memory protection for separation, enabling safe and secure isolation, so that system designers can meet freedom-from-interference requirements between critical and non-critical applications of the ECU.

This joint solution also includes support for the Green Hills ASIL-certified MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) and C/C++ compilers which increase developer productivity while enabling developers to shorten the time to find and fix bugs and optimize applications on multicore processors such as the ST Stellar MCUs. The MULTI IDE's advanced History^® event viewer and TimeMachine^® back-in-time debugger make it easy to quickly find and fix difficult bugs and performance bottlenecks while preventing future software problems in deployed systems.

"Our collaboration with Cetitec and Green Hills on the Stellar platform brings safe and efficient solutions to our customers. They will enable them to stay at the forefront of the shift towards more sustainable, software-defined vehicles of the future," said Davide Santo, ST Automotive Microcontroller Business Unit Director.

"As SDV architectures are being fast-tracked by OEMs, platforms that reduce the time to ECU/feature integration while efficiently managing communications are key enablers for reducing the cost to develop and the time to deploy," said Dan Mender, VP Business Development at Green Hills Software. "Our collaboration with STMicroelectronics and Cetitec is foundational to enabling efficient, scalable and configurable communications solutions for next-generation SDV domain/zonal controller ECUs."

"We believe that providing a great infrastructure for easy application development is paramount for the future OEMs to be able to make the SDV a great success. Cooperation with our partners is an important step to achieve this," said Dr. Michael Back, CEO of Cetitec, sharing his vision of the future.

Green Hills, ST, and Cetitec will demonstrate the zonal controller solution platform at embedded world 2024, April 9-11, in the Green Hills booth #4-325 and in the ST booth #4A-148. OEMs or Tier 1 suppliers who would like to know more or see a demo at embedded world can schedule an appointment at https://ghs.com/events/ew_2024.html.

About Green Hills Software
Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178 RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL 6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the military/avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software at https://www.ghs.com.

Green Hills, the Green Hills logo, MULTI, INTEGRITY, TimeMachine, History and µ-velOSity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Green Hills Software in the U.S. and/or internationally. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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