Reducing the amount of copper in the vehicle especially in the wiring harness reduces initial cost and improves the fuel economy. In addition to increased steel costs, copper costs have also risen dramatically. The cash price of copper has already risen 31 percent this year. According to some reports, the average weight of a vehicle wiring harness was about 80 pounds a couple of years ago and was forecast to double in five years given the current trend. Greater utilization of the networking capability could reverse that trend.

“People are using a lot more bus structures in the vehicle than would be necessary if they actually were utilizing all of the bandwidth of available structures,” said Serge Leef, general manager of the System-Level Engineering Division, Mentor Graphics. “There are actually internal rules inside some large American companies that you cannot put any more traffic than 30 percent on a CAN bus,” he said. The low utilization rate increases the amount of copper and adds to the vehicle’s total weight. Eliminating unnecessary weight contributes to better fuel efficiency in any size vehicle, no matter what type of powertrain is used.

In Europe, some companies use tools and embedded software, from Mentor Graphics and others to drive the utilization of onboard buses to much higher levels. “Our software enables utilization of upwards of 90 percent,” said Leef.

Mentor Graphics’ Volcano Network Architect is a system design and architecture tool that allows the design of a top down network by declaring all the ECUs, all the messages and all the rules associated with messages. Using the tool to describe the system, Volcano automatically generates the layers of software that manage the communications on the actual ECUs.

The other part of the Mentor Graphics solution is Volcano Target Package (VTP), embedded software that gets loaded into every ECU. It provides an interaction layer that insolates the applications developer from the actual mechanics of the communications and allows better utilization. A bus utilization of 90 percent versus the typical 30 percent found on most of today’s vehicles would reduce the weight of copper and increase fuel economy.

While powertrain changes including hybrids and clean diesel technology that meets US standards are some of the more obvious areas to expedite, they are not the only ones. Other vehicle differentiating technologies, such as infotainment and body electronics, as well as business as usual hardware improvements need to change fast and be correct the first time, too.

“We have seen a lot more focus on simulating systems and simulating multiple ECUs on networks,” said Vector’s Cain. “This obviously cuts down the time to market because it reduces the amount of prototyping work that goes on in the development side of the V.”

One bus architecture improvement that needs to be implemented is the use of the FlexRay protocol for more bandwidth and/or deterministic/ fault-tolerant operation. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation and evaluation can speed up this integration. Figure 4 shows dSpace’s approach for FlexRay HIL analysis.

Besides adding a new bus, reducing the number of ECUs communicating between each other is another highly desirable automotive systemlevel change. With 40 or 50 or even 60 ECUs, the communications between them is at or possibly even beyond a reasonable limit. “There has been a fairly big effort to try to minimize the number of ECUs and to do that, there is a whole bunch of architectural problems,” said dSpace’s Kott.

dSpace System Desk allows the software architect to start with the overall architecture of the system and develop the interconnections between the ECU hardware and software modules. This allows mapping of software modules to ECUs based on required functionality and performing simulations to optimize the number of ECUs.

Perhaps the biggest differentiator for automakers is quality. While the goal of development tools is to improve quality, one company, Mentor Graphics, recently announced that its virtual prototyping tool, SystemVision, supports Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) methodologies to achieve cost-effective design innovation by a modeldriven development process. Combined with model-driven development, DFSS methodologies can result in significant improvements in both productivity and quality with virtual prototyping, automated data collection, and statistical analyses used in the modeldriven development process. That model-driven process is increasingly collaborative.

Synopsys virtual platforms form the basis for extensive collaboration in the design process. Figure 5 shows the different design tools that they offer for different portions of the design cycle and examples of the collaborating companies. This level of collaboration can identify quality problems early in the design process. “We allow the semiconductor vendor to get feedback from the rest of the design chain very early,” said Frank Schirrmeister, director, product marketing, System-Level Solutions, Synopsys, Inc.

How much time can be saved in automotive design using this approach is difficult to qualify exactly but there are ways to estimate the savings. “We have seen in the wireless world cycle time reductions up to 9 to 12 months,” said Schirrmeister. In automotive, he expects more complicated chips like multimedia ICs to have similar results so simulation and analysis can be performed as much as a year before the actual silicon is available using the virtual platform.

Interoperability can occur without specific collaboration between toolmakers. Standards activities from ISO or SAE or automotive-specific private consortiums such as AUTOSAR or the Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems (ASAM) allow tool vendors to provide implicit integration by supporting these data and interface standards. “So even without knowing a lot about the other tools that are out there, if you know you are conforming to standards and implementing them correctly, there is a very good chance you’re going to have some level of interoperability right out of the box,” said Vector’s Jensen.

But collaboration is pervasive. Perhaps one of the more interesting demonstrations of industrywide cooperation is a user group meeting, such as MathWorks Automotive Conference where over 20 software tool and test and development companies participated. The pervasive use of MathWorks MATLAB and Simulink tools as well as MathWorks collaborative efforts, such as their Connections program, support cooperation with third party solutions. Some of the papers presented at the conference demonstrated the interoperability that can be achieved. In one paper, ASAM-MBFS: A Standardized Block Library as Enabler of Efficient Model- Based Collaboration, co-authored by engineers from Continental and Audi, the authors concluded that the ASAM- Model-Based Function Specification (MBFS) provides a standard for efficient exchange of functional models representing ECU algorithms or executable specifications. “Models can be transferred between different modeling tools and between different companies and organizations,” they observed.

The role of tools and automakers’ attitude toward software development is certainly changing. “The auto industry is really starting to shift where a lot of the intellectual property is in the models, the features that they have got to create,” said Jon Friedman, automotive industry marketing manager, The MathWorks. Noting the importance of getting to market first with innovations such as Ford’s Sync or GM’s OnStar, he concludes, “It’s not hard to copy, but if you get that head start on people, you get a real advantage.”