Future automotive architectures are expected to transition from a network-centric to a domain-centered architecture featuring central compute units. Powerful domain controllers or smart sensors alleviate the load on these central units and communication systems. These controllers execute tasks with varying criticalities on heterogeneous multicore processors, and are ideally capable of dynamically balancing the computing load between the central unit and sensors. Here, Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities playa crucial role, as it is in high demand for such an automotive architecture. However, AI still requires specialized accelerators to improve their computation performance. Task-oriented distributed computing with criticalities up to ASIL-D necessitates the development and utilization of specialized methodologies, such as safety, through the isolation and abstraction of low-level hardware concepts. Meanwhile, online monitoring and diagnostics become vital features to detect errors during operation. The EMDRIVE architecture includes methods, components, and strategies to enhance the performance, safety, and security of such distributed computing platforms. The nationally funded EMDRIVE project connects its twelve partners from academia and industry and is currently in its intermediate stage.

Locks are widely used as a synchronization method to guarantee the mutual exclusion for accesses to shared resources in multi-core embedded systems. They have been studied for years to improve performance, fairness, predictability etc. and a variety of lock implementations optimized for different scenarios have been proposed. In practice, applying an appropriate lock type to a specific scenario is usually based on the developer's hypothesis, which could mismatch the actual situation. A wrong lock type applied may result in lower performance and unfairness. Thus, a lock profiling tool is needed to increase the system transparency and guarantee the proper lock usage. In this paper, an operating-system-independent lock profiling approach is proposed as there are many different operating systems in the embedded field. This approach detects lock acquisition and lock releasing using hardware tracing based on hardware-level spinlock characteristics instead of specific libraries or APIs. The spinlocks are identified automatically; lock profiling statistics can be measured and performance-harmful lock behaviors are detected. With this information, the lock usage can be improved by the software developer. A prototype as a Java tool was implemented to conduct hardware tracing and analyze locks inside applications running on the Infineon AURIX microcontrollers.

As the complexity of multicore SoCs increases, more potential system issues are arising. Hardware-related configuration issues are becoming more complicated owing to the introduction of more cores and various complex peripherals. Considering the complexity of multicore programming, consultation of the main source of guidance, i.e. the user manual, is not an efficient approach to identify such problems. Improper hardware-related configurations could lead to either functional or performance issues. Some of these issues are even subtle and hard to detect. Therefore, a rule-based validation methodology is proposed to deal with hardware-related configuration issues in an efficient and reliable way. Hardware trace is applied in this methodology to detect issues even before symptoms appear. The method directly observes the register accesses and detects bugs based on trace data. It is independent of the application as long as they are run on the given platform, which means the same method implementation could be applied to any applications on the same platform. In this paper, an initial proof-of-concept for the proposed methodology has been implemented and demonstrated on the Infineon TC29 device.

In this paper, we firstly give an overview of the security perimeter in modern automotive systems and propose then a cost effective solution for authentication of communication data. The proposed solution provides end to end protection, it covers the aspects data content and generation time (freshness) and it can be implemented for different standard communication busses without a bus protocol change. Its low overhead makes it in particular suited for short data messages of real time systems, like messages on bandwidth restricted automotive buses.

Effective integration of advanced systems-on-chip (SoC) requires extensive reuse of IP modules as well as automation of the IP integration process, including verification. Key enablers for this are standards to describe and package IP modules. We focus on the IP-XACT standards and demonstrate how these standards are deployed in three industrial IP integration flows. Further, we report on two future extensions to IP-XACT that are currently being explored in the SPRINT project, i.e. IP-XACT based verification software generation and IP-XACT based configuration of debug environments. We conclude that IP-XACT is enabling powerful IP integration methodologies and that future extensions can further increase the effectiveness of IP-XACT standards.

Microcontrollers are the core part of automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs). A significant investment of the ECU manufacturers and even their customers is linked to the specified microcontroller family. To preserve this investment it is required to continuously design new generations of the microcontroller with hardware and software compatibility but higher system performance and/or lower cost. The challenge for the microcontroller manufacturer is to get the relevant inputs for improving the system performance, since a microcontroller is used by many customers in many different applications. For Infmeon's latest TriCorereg based 32-bit microcontroller product line, the required statistical data is gathered by using the trace features of the Emulation Device (ED). Infineon's customers use EDs in their unchanged target system and application environment. With an analytical methodology and based on this statistical data, the performance improvements of different SoC architecture and implementation options can be quantified. This allows an objective assessment of improvement options by comparing their performance cost ratios.

The introduction of complex SoCs with multiple processor cores presents new development challenges, such that development support is now a decisive factor when choosing a system-on-chip (SoC). The presented development support strategy addresses the challenges using both architecture and technology approaches. The multi-core debug support (MCDS) architecture provides flexible triggering using cross triggers and a multiple core break and suspend switch. Temporal trace ordering is guaranteed down to cycle level by on-chip time stamping. The package sized-ICE (PSI) approach is a novel method of including trace buffers, overlay memories, processing resources and communication interfaces without changing device behavior. PSI requires no external emulation box, as the debug host interfaces directly with the SoC using a standard interface.

SystemC, users and tool providers are at a crossroads. More and more companies are using SystemC; however EDA companies are hesitant to give a full commitment to SystemC tools, especially at system-level. There are several reasons for this dichotomy. While users seem excited about SystemC for its technical qualities for system-level design, tool providers may not share this excitement because of the current small market for such tools. Are the existing (free) reference implementation and the current small market for system level tools to blame, or are there any technical issues impeding the fast development of SystemC tools? Among the SystemC users from industry and academia there is currently some uncertainty about the future availability of state of the art EDA tools supporting SystemC. This panel brings together industrial SystemC users as well as EDA companies to discuss these issues. The industrial panellists will present the current situation regarding the use of SystemC in industry, its importance (or lack thereof) for system design and future needs for such tools. The tool providers will explain their current position regarding the commitment to SystemC and clarify their future plans for supporting it.