Automotive Software Development for a Multi-Core System-on-a-Chip

There are many economic and technical arguments for the reduction of the number of Electronic Control Units (EC Us) aboard a car. One of the key obstacles to achieve this goal is the limited composability, fault isolation and error containment of today´s single- processor architectures. However, significant changes in the chip architecture are taking place in order to manage the synchronization, energy dissipation, and fault-handling requirements of emerging billion transistor SoCs (systems-on-a-chip). The single processor architecture is replaced by multi-core SoCs that communicate via networks-on-chip (NoC). These emerging multi-core SoCs provide an ideal execution environment for the integration of multiple automotive ECUs into a single SoC This paper presents a model-based software development method for designing applications using these multi-core SoCs.