CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
20 April 2009
Product News
Mentor Graphics Strengthens Its Automotive Solutions with New Integrated AUTOSAR Design Environment
Mentor Graphics Corporation announced technology that makes possible an AUTOSAR-based vehicle system design flow from architectural exploration to implementation. The new product, Volcano™ Vehicle Systems Architect (VSA), enables AUTOSAR-based system and embedded software design with support for FlexRay, CAN & LIN network design. VSA improves quality, reliability, time to market, and cost advantages by facilitating the use of standard interfaces and components based on AUTOSAR.
VSA, the first member of Mentor’s AUTOSAR product family to be announced, focuses on the model-driven design process, incorporating the AUTOSAR standard. This approach allows customers to reduce their reliance on downstream validation and physical prototyping. Automotive companies can achieve substantial cost savings in the development process by moving significant decisions and verification tasks to the front end of the design cycle.
AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) is a worldwide development partnership of car manufacturers, suppliers and other companies from the electronics, semiconductor and software industry. Since 2003 the AUTOSAR Consortium has worked on the development and introduction of open, standardized software architecture for the automotive industries.
AUTOSAR impact is worldwide. In Japan, JasPar (Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture) has been working on the evaluation and testing of AUTOSAR results. Tools such as VSA, which facilitate the adoption of AUTOSAR and related technologies, are regarded as having important implications for the Japanese automotive market. JasPar is using the experience of the consortium members and standards such as AUTOSAR and FlexRay to create future automobile design standards for Japan. Mentor Graphics is a premium member of both AUTOSAR and JasPar.
With VSA, engineers can design, explore and compare electronic and software architectures. VSA further allows users to take advantage of “correct-by-construction” design methodology reducing reliance on test-oriented validation approaches. VSA supports multi-partner, distributed iterative development enabling greater interaction between OEMs and Tier1 suppliers. The product is based on the open-source, plug and play, Eclipse Integrated Development Environment, making VSA easily extensible by the customers as well as other tool suppliers.
"The number of AUTOSAR ECUs [Electronic Control Units] is increasing significantly in the automobile industry within the next car generations. In order to design those systems, the industry is looking for an open tool-framework supporting the full AUTOSAR metamodel for authoring, consistency check and validation; an example of this would be Eclipse. We don't need a short-term solution but instead a solution which supports the future AUTOSAR process even in a more long-term perspective,” said Dr. Guenter Reichart, one of the founders of AUTOSAR. “Mentor Graphics has taken this challenge, and Mentor's VSA tool is now ready and fully supporting the needs.”
“The AUTOSAR standard does a great job of standardizing, but it doesn’t necessarily simplify the design process. To design AUTOSAR-based systems, you need tools that take the complexity out of the design process and allow development teams to focus on their real jobs of delivering application software, ECUs or the networking system. This is what we are providing today,” said Serge Leef, general manager, System-level Engineering Division, Mentor Graphics.
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