Arm and Panasonic in automotive tech alliance

The organisations share a common vision for creating a software stack with the flexibility to meet the current and future needs for automotive. Now they have aligned on this through their active participation in SOAFEE*1, an industry-wide initiative that is driving greater collaboration in standardised software development across the automotive market.

This new partnership will see PAS and Arm adopt and extend the device virtualisation framework VirtIO to decouple automotive software development from hardware and accelerate automotive industry development cycles.

The industry increasingly consolidated Electronic Control Units (ECUs) into a single powerful ECU such as Cockpit Domain Controller (CDC) or High-Performance Computer (HPC). This has made hypervisors and advanced chipsets more important than ever.

However, many automakers and tier-1 suppliers are challenged by vendor-specific proprietary interfaces, which leads to increased costs and delivery time when transitioning from one vendor solution to another.

PAS and Arm say they recognise the need to shift from a hardware-centric to a software-first development model to address these challenges. By standardising the interfaces between automaker and tier-1 supplier software stacks and the underlying hypervisors and chipsets these run on, it is easier for automotive partners to adopt the latest generations of technology optimised for their needs and use cases.

This new partnership will involve several key initiatives – among them utilising VirtIO-based Unified HMI to standardise zonal architecture.

PAS and Arm are leveraging VirtIO not only for virtualising devices connected to the central ECU like CDC/HPC, but also for remote devices linked to zonal ECUs.

The partners have demonstrated a groundbreaking proof-of-concept using PAS’s open-source remote GPU technology, Unified HMI, to implement a Display Zonal Architecture built on Arm.

This architecture distributes GPU loads from the central ECU to multiple zonal ECUs, reducing heat generation and harness weight without altering applications running on the central ECU.

The flexible partitioning in the Mali™-G78AE GPU of Zonal ECUs allocates dedicated hardware resources to different workloads, enabling deterministic graphics performance in a Display Zonal Architecture.

PAS and Arm are collaborating to provide a SOAFEE Blueprint and reference implementation of this work, aiming to standardise emerging zonal architectures in the automotive industry.

Another plus is ensuring environmental parity from cloud to car: PAS’s vSkipGen™ operates on Arm® Neoverse™-based cloud servers. By maintaining the same Arm CPU architecture and VirtIO device virtualisation framework, this initiative will ensure full environmental parity between cloud virtual hardware and automotive hardware.

PAS and Arm will collaborate to implement VirtIO in virtual hardware, further bridging the gap between virtual and physical automotive systems.

The tech alliance will also expand VirtIO Standardization: Currently focused on cockpit use cases like Android Automotive™ and Automotive Grade Linux™, PAS and Arm aim to broaden the VirtIO standards to encompass more automotive applications.

This includes standardising interfaces for Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to decouple Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) software from hardware dependencies.

Masashige Mizuyama, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of PAS said: “Our partnership with Arm aims to promote the standardisation of VirtIO and bring this industry reference standard to the next level.

“By combining the expertise and industry leadership of our organisations, we are confident that this collaboration will unlock software potential and serve as a crucial foundation for building the future of automotive technology towards SDV.”

Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager, Automotive Line of Business at Arm, added: “SDVs continue to be one of the most exciting opportunities for automakers today but realising this vision demands innovative approaches that allow software developers to begin their work before physical silicon is available.

“Our partnership with PAS stems from both organisations’ active participation in SOAFEE and builds on a shared goal to reduce fragmentation in the industry through standardisation, which will ultimately accelerate automotive development cycles for our partners.”

Arm is a superchip architect with facilities around the world. Quoted on the Nasdaq market in the US it retains its headquarters in Cambridge.

Panasonic Automotive Systems was launched in April 2022 and has operations in 22 territories, around 30,000 employees and sales running into multibillions.