Multicore support, security on Autosar roadmap

Before the end of the year, release 4.0 of the Autosar environment will be available. The currently available interim release 3.1 aimed at a quick solution enabling the support of diagnosis for emission-relevant parameters which had become necessary due to legislation in the USA, explained Autosar spokesperson Simon Fuerst. Similar requirements are to be expected in Europe in the near future, Fuerst estimates.

Release 4.0 will be a major release, concluding phase II of the Autosar development which is scheduled to terminate by the end of the current year. The main goal for phase II is broadening massively the support for new hardware technologies such as multicore processors, Fuerst explains. Ethernet support will be included in 4.0 as well as support for functional safety requirements as described in ISO standard 26262. In addition, the release will contain more than 2000 new application interfaces including the data format definitions of relevant in-car signals.

Another feature new to automotive software environments is that Autosar 4.0 will include methodologies supporting volume production. For instance, the Fibex (Field bus exchange format) standard has been harmonized with Autosar. "There are no non-solvable divergences anymore," Fuerst said.

Against the background of increasing entanglement of automotive electronics, telematics and consumer electronics devices, the Autosar consortium also includes what Fuerst calls a "complete state-of-the-art security suite", embracing functional support for data encryption and authentication. For later versions, hardware support for these functions is likely to expect.

Release 5.0, due about 2012, will take into account the challenges created by alternative drive types such as hybrid or electric drives. "Basically, these drive types do not pose much different requirements to automotive software developers," Fuerst explained. "From the Autosar perspective, they are just new applications." For this reason, the release will likely contain a number of additional application program interfaces aiming at these traction types.

Related articles and links:

www.autosar.org

Virtualization ready to fly

Automotive revolution ahead, Indian expert predicts