Green Hills Software together with STMicroelectronics and Cetitec announced a collaboration to deliver an integrated and configurable communications platform for use in zonal controllers for the centralized EE vehicle architecture of the SDV. This solution consists of Green Hills' u-velOSity real-time operating system (RTOS), ST's Stellar Integration MCU platform, and Cetitec's advanced networking stacks, gateways and routing frameworks. The automotive industry is currently aligned to transition to the Software-Defined Vehicle which requires a change in the vehicles' EE architecture.

A significant number of the ECUs in currently decentralized or domain-based architectures will be consolidated into a small number of high-performance compute units combined with zonal controllers. This zonal-based centralized architecture has increased requirements for performance, safety and security of the zonal controllers and necessitates new in-vehicle networking solutions. ST's Stellar Integration MCUs provide a 10x increase in performance compared to previous generations of vehicleMCUs and adds required features such as extensible memory and OTA (over-the-air update) support, allowing OEMs to update and add new features during the lifetime of the vehicle.

Running on ST's latest Stellar MCUs, Green Hills' u-vel OSity RTOS benefits from access to the latest hardware updates of the Stellar P and G microcontrollers. The Green HillsMULTI integrated development environment (IDE) fully integrates with the Stellar Studio development environment, making the development of applications faster and easier to debug. Based on this platform, Cetitec provides a demonstrator consisting of the Cetitec Gateway and the Cetitec Distributed Communications Framework (CDCF).

These communications solutions bridge the gap between automotive-specific protocols such as CAN, LIN, Ethernet and a service-oriented software architecture, where Ethernet is often used as the vehicle networking technology. Cetitec Gateway is highly configurable, has the ability to update the routing configuration post-build without recompiling the firmware, and supports all standard automotive networking protocols. The ST Stellar Data Move Engine (DME) runs on one of the Arm®?-M4 cores present in the Stellar MCUs performing the communication routing functionality which offloads the main Stellar MCU core (Cortex-R52) running the Green Hills u-velOSity RTOS.

The MULTI IDE's advanced History®? event viewer and TimeMachine®? back-in-time debugger make it easy to quickly find and fix difficult bugs and performance bottlenecks while preventing future software problems in deployed systems.