The European-funded HAL4SDV project aims to advance European solutions in software-defined vehicles by introducing a hardware abstraction layer positioned between executed software and execution units. HAL4SDV includes over 60 partners across 12 countries and receives funding within the Chips Joint Undertaking under Horizon Europe since April 2024 and is coordinated by TTTech Computertechnik. The proposed hardware abstraction layer includes safety-critical scheduling and platform deployment of software tasks, and is motivated by the requirement for abstracted hardware with unified interfaces in centralized automotive architectures.This work presents a correct-by-construction workflow which is developed by academic partners to schedule and deploy periodic software tasks onto diverse execution units. The workflow facilitates the execution of the same task stack on multiple unit architectures and consists of a task model and scheduling algorithm, which is followed by platform deployment for diverse hardware units, ensuring safe execution. In this multi-partner project, a bandwidth regulation unit for hardware accelerators and a RISC-V-based multicore system with tightly coupled memories are used as target platforms.A RoboRacer driving stack is chosen for evaluation, showing the viability of our workflow to schedule autonomous driving functions. To show generalization capability, synthetic task sets are additionally used to validate our deployment workflow.

The FEDERATE and HAL4SDV projects aim to address the growing importance of software in the automotive industry, positioning Europe as a leader in the software-defined vehicle (SDV) domain. FEDERATE focuses on building a cohesive European SDV ecosystem by coordinating stakeholders such as OEMs, tiers, semiconductor companies, and research institutions. It supports the agile development of a non-differentiating automotive software platform through open-source collaboration, fostering a vibrant SDV community and providing guidance for ongoing and future SDV projects. Meanwhile, HAL4SDV aligns with the ECS Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda to develop technologies and processes needed for SDV advancement beyond 2030. HAL4SDV's objectives include creating a unified software interface, hardware abstraction, and Over-The-Air updates, while focusing on cybersecurity, real-time capabilities, and seamless integration of new software functions and modified software building blocks into the target vehicle system. Together, these projects aim to drive innovation, scalability, and sustainability in the SDV area.

Among the actual trends that will affect society in the coming years, autonomous driving stands out as having the potential to disruptively change the automotive industry as we know it today. As a consequence, this will also highly impact the semiconductor industry and open new market opportunities, since semiconductors play an indispensable role as enablers for automated vehicles. Fully automated driving has been identified as one major enabler to master the Grand Societal Challenges of safe, clean, and efficient mobility. For this, fail-operational behavior is essential in the sense, plan, and act stages of the automation chain in order to handle safety-critical situations by its own, which currently is not reached with state-of-the-art approaches also due to missing reliable environment perception and sensor fusion. PRYSTINE, which was the highest ranked ECSEL project proposal in 2017, will realize Fail-operational Urban Surround perceptION (FUSION) which is based on robust Radar and LiDAR sensor fusion and control functions in order to enable safe automated driving in urban and rural environments. Furthermore, PRYSTINE will strengthen and extend traditional core competencies of the European industry, research organizations, and universities in smart mobility and in particular in the electronic component and systems and cyber-physical systems domain.