SymTA/S supports ECU software development on new multicore AURIXTM automotive microcontrollers from Infineon

Featuring up to three independent 32-bit TriCoreTM CPUs, the AURIX MCUs from Infineon have been designed to meet the exacting ISO 26262 safety requirements for automotive applications while significantly increasing performance. The modular design and memory approach of AURIX provide the scalability that customers increasingly demand and its in-built encryption technology is designed to meet the upcoming security requirements of next-generation vehicles. The AURIX family is ideally suited to powertrain applications including hybrid and electric vehicles as well as safety applications such as steering, braking, airbag and advanced driver assistance (ADAS) systems. With AURIX, both powertrain and safety applications can be controlled using a single ECU.

“The performance requirements of embedded applications in the automotive domain increasingly demand the implementation of specialist multicore MCUs like AURIX in order to achieve the desired features at a reasonable cost,” said Dr. Marek Jersak, CEO of Symtavision. “However, regardless of whether designers are developing software for the AURIX family from scratch or migrating existing software from a single core ECU, the process raises some interesting and difficult challenges.”

As Symtavision’s partner, Infineon recommends SymTA/S for model-based development of automotive ECU software for multicore systems. Multicore platforms offer new opportunities and advantages and also extend the design space for software architectures like runnable to core mappings. The decision as to which runnables should be mapped to which cores and which data containers lie in which memories, is strongly influenced by communication overheads. Communication between the cores, realized through Inter OS-Application Communication in AUTOSAR 4, and also the communication with external memories can lead to significant additional execution times for runnables. These communication overheads can easily eat up the performance improvements expected from a multicore ECU. The question is: how big are these overheads and how can they be reduced? SymTA/S provides the answers, efficiently facilitating the memory mapping of runnables and data as well as answering any necessary “what-if questions. This helps software designers to produce a software architecture of good quality and to utilize multicore platforms efficiently.

“Using the well-structured SymTA/S approach to map software on the AURIX multicore microcontrollers can significantly reduce development and migration efforts,” said Jens Harnisch, Tool Partner Manager at Infineon Technologies AG. “Furthermore the SymTA/S approach scales with the number of cores.”