According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the global electric car market will reach 60 million electric vehicles by 2040. As competition increases, efficiency defined by the traveling range at a given speed and watt-hours consumption is a key success metric. Automotive companies are focusing on electronics hardware and software to enable a more intelligent solution using fewer electromechanical parts to improve efficiency. In this race, developers are faced with hardware design, software development and system testing challenges, such as early design space exploration, electrical component selection, expensive prototypes, model availability, complex software development and integration, functional safety testing and large-scale high bandwidth secure multi-protocol verification.
"Electronics plays a significant role in improving the efficiency of electric vehicle systems," said Burkhard Huhnke, Chief Technology Officer at Fisker Inc. "Reducing development cost and time, and increasing time-to-market requires deploying new development tools. Virtual prototyping tools allow for earlier, more productive and broadly scalable development. Synopsys' integrated virtual prototyping solution for electric vehicle development is a great step forward, enabling multi-discipline development and collaboration."
Synopsys' integrated multi-discipline solution based on industry-proven virtual prototyping technologies have been enhanced to support the specific needs of EV design including:
- EV model libraries for power electronic, microcontrollers and AUTOSAR components
- Multi-level fast simulation from abstract to high fidelity for detailed analysis
- Debug, analysis and test functionality to support functional safety, HW/SW debug, variation analysis, coverage analysis and calibration design tasks
- APIs for integration into additional automotive flows and tools including support for the Functional Mockup Interface (FMI).
"Optimizing battery management systems, handling complexity of software, and ensuring functional safety are some of the key EV development challenges our customers are facing today," said Tom De Schutter, vice president of Engineering at Synopsys. "Our continuous investment in virtual prototyping technologies provides our automotive customers a more comprehensive application focused solution, enabling them to reduce development cost and deliver better products."
