SOAFEE
Assembly Line
Panasonic Automotive Systems and Arm Partner to Standardize Software-Defined Vehicles
Panasonic Automotive Systems Co., Ltd. (PAS) and Arm announced a strategic partnership aimed at standardizing automotive architecture for Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). The two organizations share a common vision for creating a software stack with the flexibility to meet the current and future needs for automotive and have aligned on this through their active participation in SOAFEE (https://www.soafee.io/), an industry-wide initiative that is driving greater collaboration in standardized software development across the automotive market. This new partnership will see PAS and Arm adopt and extend the device virtualization framework VirtIO to decouple automotive software development from hardware and accelerate automotive industry development cycles.
PAS and Arm are leveraging VirtIO not only for virtualizing devices connected to the central ECU like CDC/HPC, but also for remote devices linked to zonal ECUs. The two organizations have demonstrated a groundbreaking proof-of-concept using PAS’s open-source remote GPU technology, Unified HMI, to implement a Display Zonal Architecture built on Arm. This architecture distributes GPU loads from the central ECU to multiple zonal ECUs, reducing heat generation and harness weight without altering applications running on the central ECU. The flexible partitioning in the Mali™-G78AE GPU of Zonal ECUs allocates dedicated hardware resources to different workloads, enabling deterministic graphics performance in a Display Zonal Architecture. PAS and Arm are collaborating to provide a SOAFEE Blueprint and reference implementation of this work, aiming to standardize emerging zonal architectures in the automotive industry.