Electronic Control Units
How will you manage the growing number of electronic control units (ECUs) while reducing cost, complexity, and quality?
Wind River® Hypervisor is a Type 1 hypervisor that runs directly on the ECU hardware. It provides virtualization capabilities that enable the configuration of single and multi-core processors with multiple operating systems to control the system hardware and to monitor any guest operating systems.
For original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers looking to reduce space, weight, cost, and complexity by consolidating ECUs, Wind River Hypervisor offers a means to leverage current investments in software solutions while gaining the benefit of fewer chips under the hood. Wind River Hypervisor can enable multiple guest operating systems, including AUTOSAR, on a single core or single multi-core chipset.
Features and Benefits of Wind River Hypervisor for ECU Consolidation
Benefits
Consolidation
OEMs and suppliers can reduce cost, power, and complexity by lowering the number of electronic control units in the vehicle. With Wind River Hypervisor, you can consolidate existing systems to a single or multi-core solution, so you can pack more features and functions into fewer ECUs, saving money while decreasing costs.
Efficient Adoption of Multi-core
Multi-core processors promise increased performance and reduced power consumption; however, adapting software developed for single processors to run on multi-core processors can be a daunting task. Using Wind River Hypervisor in a supervised asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) configuration makes systems easier to configure, reduces complexity by increasing protection between cores, and provides a more scalable and reliable solution.
Future Flexibility
Multi-core is a big change for many software development teams. Wind River Hypervisor provides the ability to support different multi-core configurations including AMP and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Development teams are not forced into a single architecture, allowing them to start with one configuration and then move to a hypervisor and add another guest OS later. This strategy could be used as a planned migration to multi-core or for different variations of product lines.
Features
- Processors: Supports single and multi-core processors based on Intel® and PowerPC architectures (other processors also available)
- Operating systems: Integrates with VxWorks® and Wind River Linux; supports other operating systems and executives including AUTOSAR
- Virtual board interface: Provides an interface to port onto the Hypervisor operating systems or applications that do not require an operating system
- Protection: Enables devices to be assigned to virtual boards; provides device and memory protection between virtual boards
- Configuration: Uses convenient XML-based system configuration; configuration changes do not require rebuilding guest operating systems or applications
- Build: Provides system projects for building entire multi-OS systems from Wind River Workbench
- Debugging: Debugs multiple virtual boards via one physical Ethernet connection; agent-based debugging of VxWorks and Wind River Linux applications
- Core scheduling: Provides a priority-based scheduler; partitioned and custom schedulers can be supported
- Communication: Provides multi-core/multi-OS inter-process communication (MIPC), a message-passing protocol designed for communication between cores or virtual boards; uses a socketlike API and shared memory as a fast, efficient ("zero-copy") communications medium between operating systems
- Virtual devices: Provides virtualized access to devices such as serial ports and network cards
- Virtual board management: Enables start, stop, and reload/restart of guest operating systems
- On-chip debugging: Debugs either a single guest or an entire system using Wind River Workbench On-Chip Debugging
Why We Uniquely Qualify to Be Your Supplier
With market-leading embedded products and a rich heritage of automotive expertise, only Wind River can deliver advanced technology solutions to help you crack the ECU proliferation challenge. Combined with our award-winning long-term support and customization/optimization services, Wind River delivers the total solution for managing ECU complexity, cost, space, and weight challenges.
