Renesas Electronics Corporation has announced the RH850/U2x MCUs, an integrated automotive ECU Virtualization Platform. The platform allows designers to integrate multiple applications into a single Electronic Control Unit (ECU). This platform provides a ready-to-use demonstrator environment comprising pre-configured embedded software, tools, and an interactive demonstrator environment that lets the users explore design choices for the development of their individual Zone-ECU projects.
According to the company, the solution enables customers to adopt new electrical-electronic (E/E) architectures using MCU-based zone ECUs supporting multiple logical ECUs on one physical ECU. The main advantage of adopting this platform is that it maximizes legacy reuse with minimum development effort to leverage gains in lower power consumption and reduced wiring harness weight and complexity in the vehicle. The ECU virtualization solution platform combines Renesas’ RH850/U2x MCUs together with ETAS’ RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor designed for microcontrollers with hardware virtualization support. This platform provides a ready-to-use demonstrator environment comprising pre-configured embedded software, tools, and an interactive demonstrator environment.
“The transition to a zone architecture increases the design burden by changing the functional role assignments between the central ECU and each zone ECU,” said Satoshi Yoshida, Senior Director, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas. “In addition to the high performance provided by the RH850/U2x MCUs, I am confident that this new ECU Virtualization Solution Platform will give our customers the advantage of easy, fast development of advanced systems with built-in safety and security features.”
“Working together with Renesas, we were able to leverage the HW capabilities of the RH850/U2x MCUs to deliver a high performance, low overhead, an embedded hypervisor for automotive applications that complements class-leading AUTOSAR OS technologies,” said Nigel Tracey, Vice President of Vehicle Operating Systems at ETAS.
The RH850/U2x MCUs come with the RH850/U2A and RH850/U2B to offer a cost-effective, high-performance solution for next-generation Zone-/Integration-ECUs. The MCUs are specifically designed for Zone-applications targeting reduced ECU component count with minimal re-engineering overhead. To ensure proper real-time behavior of the individual integrated applications, the MCUs include features such as Hypervisor hardware support, Quality-of-Service (RH850/U2B only) support, and Safety & Security functions to enable freedom from interference and a high-performance NoC (Network-on-Chip) structure. To enable the running of one or more virtual machines(VMs) in the MCU, the ETAS’ RTA-HVR software works with the hardware virtualization features.
According to the company, the ECU Virtualization Software Platform will be made available starting from the end of May.
