Baden-Baden, Germany, Mentor Graphics at the Electronics In Vehicles Congress announced the availability of the Mentor Automotive Safety Certifiable Digital Instrument Cluster solution, enabling safety-critical driver information to be displayed simultaneously with rich 3D graphics on a single instrument-cluster display. The software architecture is implemented on a multicore and even on single-core SoC, and it features very fast boot time. This new solution addresses a key problem for the automotive OEMs: How to migrate safety-critical driver information to full-featured, graphically-rich digital instrument clusters and comply with safety standards including ISO 26262, without pushing up hardware or safety certification costs.
Automotive OEMs today design digital instrument clusters that include graphical information relating to essential warnings from the vehicle, such as icons notifying the driver of brake, engine, or tire problems. The new solution, which is compatible with safety-certified Nucleus RTOS and Mentor’s automotive-qualified Linux solutions, allows safety-critical and noncritical information to be displayed simultaneously on the same display, while maintaining isolation of safety-related functions to comply with ISO 26262 safety standards. The low-overhead isolation features of the solution are uniquely designed to enable the most efficient use of system resources to allow maximum performance of rich 3D graphics, together with complex and demanding features such as infotainment, ADAS, and smartphone connectivity, all driven from the same SoC.
The solution enables car makers to reduce costs because the system is built on precertified components such as the Nucleus SafetyCert real-time operating system (RTOS), resulting in minimization of the number of lines of new code to be safety-certified. It reduces silicon cost because the solution runs on a single SoC, or even a single core, and makes efficient use of available CPU resources.
Mentor Automotive worked with Socionext Embedded Software Austria GmbH to integrate the latter company’s CGI Studio development platform for automotive HMI with the Safety Certifiable Digital Instrument Cluster Solution. Reinhard Fuericht, general manager of Socionext’s CGI Studio BU, said, “The capability of the Mentor Automotive platform is complemented by the high-end graphics and unique mixed safety-criticality features of CGI Studio, resulting in a seamless end-to-end solution for safety-certifiable HMI from tooling to display.”
“Embedded software safety is one of the top requirements for vehicle systems designers, and our ability to merge safety-critical information from vehicle systems without compromising rich cluster graphics or functionality has been very well received by our customers,” stated Rainer Oder, general manager, Mentor Automotive.
