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How Digital Twins Shift Automotive Semiconductor Design Left

The increased focus on vehicle software content is forcing the automotive industry to migrate from its traditionally long development cycles and complex maintenance schedules to a more agile approach that supports continuous over-the-air (OTA) updates throughout a vehicle¡¯s lifespan. Digital twins of the electronics can help shift automotive development left, enabling early hardware/software integration and frontload testing. Providing virtual representations of systems under development, digital twins can be used to model automotive SoCs, the software, the electrical system, and even the entire car. Some use cases for automotive digital twins include:

• Early architecture exploration for next-generation Arm-based architectures
• Early software development (before silicon availability) for new MCUs and SoCs
• SoC performance and power validation
• Electronic control unit (ECU), vehicle platform software, and application software development and test

²ÝÁñÉçÇø and Arm have teamed up to integrate key technologies in support of digital twin use cases, providing a full range of models for the latest generation of safety-enabled Arm Automotive Enhanced (AE) technologies. On the ²ÝÁñÉçÇø side, this includes ²ÝÁñÉçÇø Platform Architect? SoC architecture analysis and optimization solution, ²ÝÁñÉçÇø Virtualizer? virtual prototyping solution, and ²ÝÁñÉçÇø ZeBu? and HAPS? hardware-assisted verification platforms. For architecture optimization, are supported by Platform Architect. , functionally accurate programmer¡¯s view models of Arm CPU and system IP, are integrated with the Virtualizer tool to enable software development before hardware availability. , pre-configured simulations of popular system configurations, are supported by the Virtualizer tool with ²ÝÁñÉçÇø IP and third-party models. Arm RTL can be executed in the ZeBu and HAPS platforms for power and performance validation and supporting hybrid solutions with ²ÝÁñÉçÇø Virtualizer for software bring-up.

In addition, ²ÝÁñÉçÇø design and verification solutions including ²ÝÁñÉçÇø.ai full-stack AI-driven EDA suite and Fusion QuickStart Implementation Kits are optimized for the highest levels of performance and power, helping our customers speed the development and delivery of optimized Arm-based SoC designs on the latest 3nm/2nm gate-all-around (GAA) technologies. For Arm-based automotive designs, ²ÝÁñÉçÇø design and verification solutions for functional safety support our mutual customers¡¯ compliance with ISO 26262.

²ÝÁñÉçÇø is also a voting member of an industry-led collaborative project in the automotive industry designed to make software development, testing, and validation more effective and efficient. The Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) project intends to produce a cloud-native architecture supported by open-source reference implementations for a variety of automotive applications. It builds on technologies that define standard boot and security requirements for the Arm architecture. 

In our role in this ecosystem, ²ÝÁñÉçÇø provides design and verification solutions, as well as silicon-proven interface, security, and silicon lifecycle management (SLM) process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) IP tofoster development of safe, secure, reliable, and high-quality automotive chips and systems. For example, ²ÝÁñÉçÇø SLM IP can be integrated into Arm-based cores to monitor chip health from development to in-field to measure and optimize performance for semiconductor lifecycle statistics, mission profile measurement, and in-field failure diagnostics. Our cloud deployment reference flows that integrate Arm-based models support key use cases, from enabling virtual driving of billions of miles to increasing test coverage. Our technologies are aligned with the functional safety standard and can help designers meet the vehicle cybersecurity framework outlined by . In addition, our experts participate in various automotive standards organizations to share their insights and contribute to the development of SDVs. And our own broad ecosystem of partners is ready to support Arm-based automotive system development with virtual ECUs.