Bringing automotive embedded software in-house

New vehicles add increasingly complex and highly integrated features, requiring electronic control units (ECUs) with significantly increased processing power. The race to offer competitive feature sets on these highly connected E/E architectures is ramping up the stress on an often already compressed development cycle. In the last few years, more and more original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have looked to reverse the historical trends for outsourcing ECU development to Tier 1 suppliers in areas containing intellectual property (IP) important to their brands and where new technologies need to be understood.

In this on-demand webinar, two seasoned experts: Mathias Fritzson, Product Manager for Capital VSTAR, and Brendan Morris, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, will explore this trend, the evolving roles of Tier 1 suppliers, and OEMs, and present supportive solutions. Register to watch now!

Break down silos and enhance collaboration by insourcing ECU development

As vehicles have become more complicated, OEMs lose time, quality, and budgets continuing their traditional operating methods. Historically, OEMs employed specialist engineers for specialist teams using specialist tools, often working in isolation. Each department operated in its unique, optimized workflow, and any communication between teams was disruptive due to the inability to collaborate. Even if OEMs bring embedded development in-house, manufacturers that continue working in silos risk miscommunication, leading to missed or misinterpreted requirements. Siemens software solution provides a unified software engineering platform that enables engineers to interact with the product direction and system definition. This ensures that software engineering stays consistent with the system needs and hardware constraints while implementing at the application level. By breaking down these silos, OEMs gain the efficiency, speed, accuracy, and quality needed for insourcing ECU development.

Reduce the risk of errors with automotive embedded software

Automakers face the challenge of increasing complexity in-vehicle systems with continuous pressure on cost and timing. Automotive embedded software has many protocols and standards requirements, making collaboration critical for OEMs when building future systems. Developers need to have an efficient, automated workflow that removes repetitive tasks, eliminates manual errors, and gives additional tool assistance when required to collaborate engineering activities. Siemens provides embedded software solutions that put the developer first and are usable in the whole vehicle with the necessary properties for the features of today and tomorrow. It is generative automated, provides an ease-of-use, and allows the reuse of the applicable parts of the design to support engineers in getting it right the first time.

Streamline ECU software development by using E/E systems

Software is fast becoming the dominant part of the vehicle value. OEMs need to ensure that the system is according to the features described at the higher level. Collaborating on IP protection is necessary for the insourcing trend of combining the OEM's IP and supplier and partner IP. The OEM's value is the developers, and the environment for them to operate in needs to be attractive, and they need to retain all of their skills. Future personal transportation needs will require a different set of configuration abilities like service-oriented architectures because functions will travel over ECUs and possibly to the cloud over a vehicle's lifetime and future variants. Streamline ECU software development starts with systems development on the digital thread, with most innovation happening in the E/E systems, ensuring that the functions' definition and allocations are coherent.

Watch the on-demand webinar to discover why in-vehicle embedded software development is increasingly displacing mechanical engineering as the differentiator in creating automotive brand experiences.