CES 2020: Siemens, ARM unveil automotive design partnership

It will be a complex business and the Siemens/ARM partnership aims to simplify the process as much as possible.

Says Fritz, "In cars of the future that means a few domain controllers replacing numerous ECUs, metres of wire becoming nanometers of wire, picosecond latency rather than millisecond latency and a power reduction from Watts to microWatts, leading to cost and weight savings."

The partnership brings together Siemens’ PAVE360 digital twin environment, featuring Arm IP, which applies high-fidelity modelling techniques from sensors and ICs to vehicle dynamics and the environment within which a vehicle operates.

Using Arm IP, including Arm Automotive Enhanced (AE) products with functional safety support, digital twin models can run entire software stacks providing early metrics of power and performance while operating in the context of a high-fidelity model of the vehicle and its environment, helping deliver a new future of mobility.

“Developing future transportation solutions requires collaboration across complex ecosystems,” said Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager, Automotive and IoT Line of Business, Arm. “Arm technology has been deployed in applications across the whole vehicle for more than two decades, and our collaboration with Siemens redefines what is possible in terms of safety-capable, scalable heterogeneous compute. We see this as an important catalyst for the next wave of automotive semiconductor innovation.”

Using Siemens’ PAVE360 with Arm automotive IP, automakers and suppliers can simulate and verify sub-system and system on chip (SoC) designs, and better understand how they perform within a vehicle design from the silicon level up, long before the vehicle is built.

Arm’s automotive IP can democratise the ability to create safety-enabled silicon, bringing it within reach of the entire automotive supply chain.

By rethinking IC design for the automotive industry, manufacturers can consolidate electronic control units (ECUs), leading to thousands of dollars in savings per vehicle by reducing the number of circuit boards and metres of wire within the vehicle design. This in turn reduces vehicle weight which can promote longer range electricvehicles.