R-Car Virtual Platform

Challenges when Developing In-Vehicle Systems in the CASE Era

The development of next-generation vehicles in the CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared & Services, Electric) era needs support for network connectivity and automated driving. This, in turn, requires a high level of communication and sensing capabilities, advanced interlocking of cognitive and decision-making functions with control functions, and enhanced functional safety and security, which results in larger and more complex systems, especially the software.

On the other hand, the process is taking longer and longer, from the requirement study to the development of System on Chip (SoC) specifications for the vehicle and the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) development. This makes it difficult to apply the latest technology to the customers' products.

Goal of the R-Car VPF

We are providing the R-Car VPF, a model that virtually simulates device functions to solve the above issues, and are aiming to achieve the following:

1. Parallel and synchronous development through software development in pre-silicon Software design can be started before the SoC development is complete by utilizing the R-Car VPF; the SoC and software can be developed in parallel to shorten the development time.

2. Using upstream system verification to prevent rework
System verification can be done by utilizing the R-Car VPF for early software development by using shift-left before the SoC development is complete, reducing rework.

Image

Virtual Turnkey Platform

The “Virtual Turnkey Platform” an application software development environment for R-Car, is a pretested R-Car SDK on the R-Car VPF which enables immediate virtual development of application software. Since this platform reproduces the actual chip with a high degree of accuracy, users don't need to use an actual board to start with the development environment, and multiple users can develop software on their own PCs or servers at the same time.

Image

• You can start software design while pre-silicon, and seamlessly transition to software design using device samples.
• System verification is possible in pre-silicon when devices and control software can cooperate with each other.
• This can also be used for post-silicon software regression testing.

• It mounts the CPU model and allows the software to run on that CPU.
• It can have R/W access to memory space such as DRAM.
• The address map and arithmetic precision will match perfectly with the corresponding devices.
• We are sequentially adding models for various IPs in response to market requirements.

Collaboration

We work closely with our partners and can leverage their tools, model libraries and other design assets.

• Renesas provides our partners with SoC specifications, design information and IP models.
• The partners themselves are also developing IP models and assembling R-Car VPFs.
• We are building an ecosystem in which many partners can participate, and the completed R-Car VPFs will be sold by the partners.
• Please contact the following partners (to be added to in due course) for purchase information.
  VDK (synopsys.com)  (Product Information)
  Contact Synopsys  (Contact)