Renesas Launches First Automotive ECU Virtualization Solution Platform to Enable Secure Integration of Various Applications of Regional ECUs

     Renesas Electronics, a global semiconductor solutions provider, announced the launch of an integrated automotive-grade ECU virtualization platform, the RH850/U2x MCU and ETAS' RTA-HVR software, enabling automotive electronics system designers to integrate multiple applications into a single ECU ( Electronic control unit), to achieve safe, reliable and relatively independent from each other to avoid mutual interference. This solution enables users to adopt a new electronic/electrical architecture (E/E architecture), using MCU-based regional ECUs, to support multiple logical ECUs on one physical ECU. Migrating to a new platform maximizes reuse of existing technologies, reduces development effort, and enables lower power consumption, reduced wiring harness weight and complexity in vehicles

     The ECU Virtualization Solution Platform combines Renesas' RH850/U2x MCUs with ETAS' RTA-HVR software, a hypervisor designed for microcontrollers with hardware virtualization support. The platform builds a ready-to-use demonstration environment including pre-configured embedded software, tools, and an interactive demonstration environment for RH850/U2x MCUs, enabling automotive users to explore a wide range of design options to develop their own regional ECUs project.

     "The transition to a regional architecture has changed the allocation of functional roles between the central ECU and each regional ECU, and also increased the design burden," said Tetsuji Yoshida, Senior Director, Automotive Digital Product Marketing Division, Renesas Electronics. In addition to high performance, I believe this new ECU virtualization solution platform will bring our customers the advantages of easy and rapid development of advanced systems with built-in functional safety and cybersecurity features.”

     "Thanks to our collaboration with Renesas, we were able to leverage the hardware capabilities of the RH850/U2x MCUs to complement the best-in-class AUTOSAR OS technology to provide high-performance, low-cost solutions for in-vehicle applications," said Nigel Tracey, Vice President of Vehicle Operating Systems at ETAS. Embedded hypervisor."

     RH850/U2x MCUs, including RH850/U2A and RH850/U2B, enable multiple ASIL D compliant software partition integration with a rich set of embedded hardware to build a cost-effective and high-performance for next-generation area/integrated ECUs. solution. These MCUs are designed for regional applications and are designed to reduce the component count of the ECU, minimizing the cost of redesigns. The RH850/U2x MCUs include hypervisor hardware support, QoS Quality of Service (RH850/U2B only) support, functional safety and network security features to avoid interference. A high-performance NoC (Network-on-Chip) structure ensures correct real-time behavior of individual integrated applications.

     The ETAS RTA-HVR software works with the hardware virtualization capabilities of the Renesas RH850U2x MCU to provide one or more virtual machines (VMs). Virtual machines are separated from each other in space (using the RH850U2x memory protection unit and protection functions) and time (using the RTA-HVR virtual machine scheduler) to meet stringent automotive functional safety and cybersecurity requirements. RTA-HVR provides a toolkit for building Virtual Device Extensions (VDE). Each virtual device consists of one or more virtual CPU cores, a subset of the device memory space, and a peripheral set