Driving the Future of Automotive Software with ETAS and Infineon

This episode features a conversation between host Janak Patel, a technical director at ETAS, and guest Hugo Ochoa, a product marketing manager at Infineon. The discussion focuses on the collaboration between ETAS and Infineon to address the challenges of vehicle software, specifically to optimize the security, performance, and functionality of next-generation microcontrollers. 

The conversation highlights how this collaboration helps the automotive industry, particularly with the shift toward software-defined vehicles, exploring the integration of ETAS's CycurHSM software into Infineon's AURIX™ TC4x microcontroller family to enhance cybersecurity, which creates a solution that meets industry standards and provides a robust security concept that eliminates performance bottlenecks.

To learn more about how ETAS and Infineon are working together to optimize vehicle security, check out these additional resources:

• White paper
• Webinar recording

Thanks for listening!

• Email us at: contact.us@etas.com
• Learn more about ETAS on our website 
• Follow us on LinkedIn: @ETAS

Transcript

00:00:02 Voiceover

Welcome to the Empowering Tomorrow's Automotive Software Podcast, brought to you by ETAS, a single source of cutting-edge software and hardware solutions that make automotive embedded systems safe, smart, secure, and sustainable.

00:00:15 Voiceover

Each episode, we'll be joined by ETAS and industry experts to discuss how electrification, automation, and connectivity are impacting the automotive industry.

00:00:25 Voiceover

Now, sit back and enjoy the discussion.

00:00:32 Janak Patel

Hello, my name is Janak Patel, technical director at ETAS in our embedded middleware solution space.

00:00:38 Janak Patel

For today's episode, we'll be talking about vehicle software.

00:00:42 Janak Patel

As vehicle software becomes more complex and need for secure solutions increases in the automotive market, close collaboration between hardware and software vendors is critical to ensure we are ready for the STV challenges.

00:00:56 Janak Patel

ETAS and Infineon collaborate to optimize security, performance, and functionality of next-generation microcontrollers.

00:01:04 Janak Patel

In this episode, I'm joined by Hugo Ochoa, product marketing manager from Infineon.

00:01:10 Janak Patel

We'll take a look at how the collaboration between ETAS and Infineon can benefit the industry.

00:01:16 Janak Patel

Hi, Hugo.

00:01:16 Janak Patel

Welcome to the podcast.

00:01:18 Janak Patel

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

00:01:20  Hugo Ochoa

Hi, Janak.

00:01:21  Hugo Ochoa

Thank you so much and happy to be here.

00:01:23  Hugo Ochoa

Like you mentioned, I'm a product manager here at Infineon.

00:01:27  Hugo Ochoa

I particularly specialize in microcontrollers, and I've been working in the automotive industry for 17 years now, and particularly working with microcontrollers over 20 years.

00:01:40  Hugo Ochoa

I started my career as an embedded software developer, you know, back when I graduated from college until 2018, where I joined the marketing team here at Infineon in

00:01:52  Hugo Ochoa

2018.

00:01:54  Hugo Ochoa

So happy to be here.

00:01:55 Janak Patel

Excellent.

00:01:57 Janak Patel

So let's dive right into it, Hugo.

00:01:59 Janak Patel

So as you know, there's an ever-growing demand for performance, real-time capability, cybersecurity in the automotive ECUs.

00:02:09 Janak Patel

Why don't we start there?

00:02:10 Janak Patel

How is Infineon addressing these challenges?

00:02:12  Hugo Ochoa

Sure.

00:02:13  Hugo Ochoa

Yes, I agree with you.

00:02:14  Hugo Ochoa

There is a big demand for multiple technologies all at once.

00:02:20  Hugo Ochoa

And Infineon is addressing this

00:02:22  Hugo Ochoa

challenges in two fronts.

00:02:24  Hugo Ochoa

The first one is we have a very strong microcontroller portfolio and an end-to-end ecosystem which is built for real-world applications like driver information, HMI, you know, body and connectivity, powertrain, electrification, and so on, right?

00:02:44  Hugo Ochoa

And secondly, right, we have continuous innovation that helps engineering teams to deliver more performance and stronger safety and security, and more importantly, to achieve all these with a faster time to market.

00:03:00  Hugo Ochoa

Now, if you look at our current microcontroller lineup, like the Traveo, PSoC, and AURIX, right, those are brands that we have at Confini on.

00:03:12  Hugo Ochoa

You will find that those are modern, scalable microcontrollers that combine multiple technologies like multiple processing units or multi-core systems.

00:03:23  Hugo Ochoa

And those are very good for real-time responsiveness, responsiveness, sorry, applications.

00:03:31  Hugo Ochoa

But also we have integrated communication interfaces like the traditional CAN, CAN FD, LIN, and Ethernet, right?

00:03:41  Hugo Ochoa

Also, right, those devices are designed to meet the most stringent safety and security requirements of the industry, right?

00:03:52  Hugo Ochoa

So, for example, you will find that we have, you know, portfolio devices that contain lockstep cores or sometimes also referred as shadow cores, as well as some hardware diagnostics.

00:04:04  Hugo Ochoa

For example, we have error correction code on memories,

00:04:09  Hugo Ochoa

And very importantly, embedded security, which nowadays is an extremely important topic for a lot of our customers to, for example, achieve secure boot into their easy use and also to have some cryptographic capabilities.

00:04:23  Hugo Ochoa

And just as important, right, the portfolio is built for scalability.

00:04:28  Hugo Ochoa

Because at the end of the day,

00:04:30  Hugo Ochoa

what we see that most customers are looking for is to commonize software and tool chains, right?

00:04:36  Hugo Ochoa

And that requires both things, hardware and software, like pin-to-pin compatible devices, long-term availability to support vehicle lifetime and platform use, and so on, right?

00:04:49  Hugo Ochoa

And the second front, as I was mentioning,

00:04:53  Hugo Ochoa

is that the innovation, right?

00:04:55  Hugo Ochoa

Just to give you an example, in today's day, right, as in-vehicle networks migrate towards Ethernet and its own architectures, Infineon incorporates hardware capabilities in our devices that help customers to unlock performance without overburdening the CPU.

00:05:14  Hugo Ochoa

Just for example, we have integrated communication accelerators, right?

00:05:19  Hugo Ochoa

We have some specific IPs like direct memory engines, bridging functions that offload the packaging and handling of all these high-speed communications across the vehicle.

00:05:32  Hugo Ochoa

And finally, this hardware assist to the customers, but also we need some robust software enablement to help to deliver predictable throughput and responsiveness, right?

00:05:44  Hugo Ochoa

And that's where we partner with software companies like you guys to be able to achieve this.

00:05:51 Janak Patel

Thanks.

00:05:52 Janak Patel

That was a lot to take in.

00:05:53 Janak Patel

And it's amazing to see how much content is going into today's microcontrollers.

00:05:59 Janak Patel

So maybe I'll talk a little bit about, you know, how we collaborate with each other.

00:06:04 Janak Patel

So as you mentioned, there's a lot of capability in today's microcontrollers.

00:06:10 Janak Patel

But you need the software to enable that.

00:06:12 Janak Patel

And that's where ETAS comes in.

00:06:13 Janak Patel

So as a software and tools vendor, many of our solutions are directly reliant on the underlying microcontroller.

00:06:22 Janak Patel

And here we collaborate on quite a few things.

00:06:25 Janak Patel

First, in our real-time operating system.

00:06:27 Janak Patel

So we have a product called RTA-OS.

00:06:30 Janak Patel

that involves a lot of early collaboration with you guys to ensure that our operating system is ported to new devices in a timely manner.

00:06:39 Janak Patel

So when Infineon releases a new microcontroller, we want to be able to have an OS that supports that microcontroller as soon as possible.

00:06:50 Janak Patel

Another big area that you brought up was security.

00:06:53 Janak Patel

That's a huge topic today, and we have a long history between ETAS and Infineon of collaborating on

00:07:00 Janak Patel

the security firmware side with our CycurHSM product that provides the software that runs on the Infineon HSM device, as well as, you know, as you mentioned, the push towards Ethernet.

00:07:14 Janak Patel

Now we have new products like CycurGATE, which provide IDS capability for those devices.

00:07:22 Janak Patel

Another area we've historically collaborated on is our ETK product, which

00:07:28 Janak Patel

essentially connects to the microcontroller through the JTAG interface and enables very high-speed measurement and calibration on Infineon devices.

00:07:39 Janak Patel

And lastly, when we talk about new technologies, like you mentioned, you know, ETAS and Infineon talk regularly on advanced topics and, you know, areas where we can collaborate on research, such as software partitioning, timing analysis, deploying software to multi-core systems, et cetera.

00:07:58  Hugo Ochoa

Right.

00:07:59  Hugo Ochoa

Oh, thank you so much for explaining our relationship and how we've been working across the years on collaborating.

00:08:07  Hugo Ochoa

But I have a question for you.

00:08:08 Janak Patel

Sure.

00:08:09  Hugo Ochoa

Can you give us some real-world examples or use cases in which we can help customers to deploy faster and go to market?

00:08:19 Janak Patel

Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:21 Janak Patel

That's one of the keys.

00:08:22 Janak Patel

If STV is all about speed and being able to deploy faster, right?

00:08:28 Janak Patel

So you hit on a key point.

00:08:30 Janak Patel

How does all this work together?

00:08:31 Janak Patel

So previously I talked about all of these different software technologies that we had.

00:08:37 Janak Patel

have, but how is that all put together?

00:08:40 Janak Patel

How can that help a customer develop a solution that fits the market needs in a timely manner?

00:08:47 Janak Patel

And so there's quite a few areas where we're working together.

00:08:51 Janak Patel

First one I'll talk about is our AUTOSAR Classic starter kit.

00:08:56 Janak Patel

If anybody's worked with AUTOSAR Classic, you know it's quite a big system.

00:09:00 Janak Patel

There's a lot of capability and there's a lot of software that a customer would need to understand.

00:09:07 Janak Patel

So what we do is we actually take the first step.

00:09:11 Janak Patel

We take the Infineon MCAL, which is a microcontroller abstraction layer, and we pair that with our RTA classic AUTOSAR solution and get that running on an Infineon evaluation board.

00:09:25 Janak Patel

So by the time the customer gets it, it's a turnkey solution where they already have

00:09:31 Janak Patel

software that's up and running on the Infineon hardware.

00:09:34 Janak Patel

It's communicating on Ethernet or CAN.

00:09:37 Janak Patel

The security software is functioning.

00:09:39 Janak Patel

And then the customers can really take that and start developing their own application on top.

00:09:45 Janak Patel

That's been a very successful collaboration we've worked on with you guys.

00:09:50 Janak Patel

You know, the other area I mentioned are HSM software.

00:09:55 Janak Patel

So the hardware security module software, there's a big need for high performance.

00:10:01 Janak Patel

And so there is quite a bit of overlap between the software and hardware.

00:10:06 Janak Patel

And so we customize the HSMs for particular Infineon targets to ensure that, you know, we're getting high performance and that involves a lot of early collaboration between our two companies.

00:10:20 Janak Patel

And the goal is, you know, by doing this early collaboration,

00:10:25 Janak Patel

our HSMs, ROSs, et cetera, they will be ready for customers when they start their projects.

00:10:32 Janak Patel

You know, they're not having to wait months for us to develop a new port or something like that.

00:10:38 Janak Patel

So maybe, Hugo, I'm always interested in what's next.

00:10:44 Janak Patel

You know, we talked about, you know, some of the new technologies, we talked about software, but really, how do you see

00:10:52 Janak Patel

the industry evolving, with new SDV challenges, customers may be thinking about, how do we future-proof our solution so that in the future, if we come up with a new idea, how can we implement that without having to change hardware?

00:11:08 Janak Patel

And, you know, how do we create scalable multi-core solutions for higher performance in the future?

00:11:14 Janak Patel

And really, what are your thoughts about all that?

00:11:18  Hugo Ochoa

That's a great question.

00:11:19  Hugo Ochoa

And that's something that I've been thinking about for quite some time.

00:11:23  Hugo Ochoa

Not only me, but also my colleagues.

00:11:25  Hugo Ochoa

And we all agree that if we look ahead, we see more and more functions pull in into these new electrical architectures.

00:11:36  Hugo Ochoa

For example, we see some functions moving to the zone or the domain controllers.

00:11:41  Hugo Ochoa

And we see that they will be interacting with a network of smart edges and nodes.

00:11:48  Hugo Ochoa

where, the quick handling and the safety is done locally, but the big decisions are actually taking place elsewhere, right?

00:11:57  Hugo Ochoa

Like in the central compute or even on the zones.

00:12:02  Hugo Ochoa

Now, when we talk about the edges, right, or these nodes, these microcontrollers we see changing a little bit of responsibilities, and those will

00:12:15  Hugo Ochoa

pre-process data, primarily to enforce local safety.

00:12:20  Hugo Ochoa

And also we expect to see more mixing of critical and non-critical tasks using virtualization and partitioning.

00:12:29  Hugo Ochoa

Some technologies that we have today, but also we see in the future, right, is virtualization, like the hypervisor that we currently support in our devices, that allows you to do this type of partitioning, right?

00:12:43  Hugo Ochoa

Also, what we see coming in is more AI, right, especially on the edges, right?

00:12:50  Hugo Ochoa

Localized and there are specific algorithms that will benefit from AI in the edges.

00:12:57  Hugo Ochoa

So certainly it's something that I'm looking forward to.

00:12:59  Hugo Ochoa

And as well as the demand for performance increases, also the demand for efficiency is increasing.

00:13:06  Hugo Ochoa

So

00:13:07  Hugo Ochoa

Efficiency will matter.

00:13:09  Hugo Ochoa

Right now, we see that it will matter as much as the speed, right?

00:13:14  Hugo Ochoa

Especially for electrical powertrain, where you might be judged more on the real-time throughput, right?

00:13:22  Hugo Ochoa

Per watt, not just per meter, right?

00:13:25  Hugo Ochoa

So that's what I expect to see in the industry moving forward.

00:13:30 Janak Patel

Yeah, that's really interesting, Hugo.

00:13:31 Janak Patel

I mean, we hardly ever think about energy usage, right?

00:13:35 Janak Patel

But

00:13:36 Janak Patel

And as you mentioned, the amount of processing that will happen in the next generation vehicles will really use a lot of power, and it's a huge consideration.

00:13:48 Janak Patel

So you talked about virtualization.

00:13:51 Janak Patel

Is that on the microcontroller side, or is that more related to the higher performance compute units?

00:13:59  Hugo Ochoa

We have technologies in our microcontrollers that allow you to do virtualization.

00:14:04  Hugo Ochoa

I'll just give you an example.

00:14:06  Hugo Ochoa

Oryx TC4 devices have hardware built in to support a hypervisor, right?

00:14:12  Hugo Ochoa

But also you need software for it, right?

00:14:16  Hugo Ochoa

And that's where partners like you, for instance, can help us on building the operating system that allows us to have this visualization.

00:14:24  Hugo Ochoa

So it's a combination of both, right?

00:14:26  Hugo Ochoa

Hardware and software.

00:14:28 Janak Patel

Yeah, absolutely.

00:14:30 Janak Patel

There is a this is a big topic for us as well, and we have a

00:14:35 Janak Patel

a lightweight hypervisor that runs on microcontroller devices using, you know, technologies within the hardware to allow somebody to develop an ECU where you can have different domains that are separated, you know, maybe mixed criticality, but it also allows you to develop potentially two different domain type of software

00:14:58 Janak Patel

without having to validate the entire software stack because they are separated by a lightweight hypervisor.

00:15:05 Janak Patel

So I think that's one of the key technologies that will be part of the STV journey.

00:15:13 Janak Patel

Well, Hugo, we've touched a range of topics involving how Infineon and ETAS are collaborating to meet industry needs from higher performance needs, cybersecurity, and ease of starting new projects.

00:15:26 Janak Patel

It's been a really fun discussion.

00:15:28 Janak Patel

Thank you.

00:15:29  Hugo Ochoa

Sure, no problem.

00:15:31  Hugo Ochoa

I had a great time talking about a lot of different topics like safety, security, high performance, multi-core, you know, hypervisor.

00:15:39  Hugo Ochoa

So it's an exciting time for the automotive industry.

00:15:42  Hugo Ochoa

Hope we can collaborate more later.

00:15:45  Hugo Ochoa

And yeah, if anyone listening have any questions, I will invite them to reach out to us or go to our website.

00:15:54  Hugo Ochoa

where they can look at our offering on microcontrollers for automotive?

00:15:59 Janak Patel

Absolutely.

00:16:00 Janak Patel

I think it's going to be really fun to see where our collaborations go next.

00:16:05 Janak Patel

And that's always fun for me as somebody who's always thinking about what's next and talking to guys like you.

00:16:13 Janak Patel

It's really enjoyable.

00:16:15 Janak Patel

So thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Empowering Tomorrow's Automotive Software Podcast.

00:16:22 Janak Patel

We hope you found our discussion insightful and valuable.

00:16:26 Janak Patel

If you'd like to learn more about this collaboration, check out our white paper and webinar recording.

00:16:31 Janak Patel

Links to both can be found in the episode description.

00:16:35 Janak Patel

If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:16:43 Janak Patel

Feel free to share this episode with your network and leave us a review.

00:16:46 Janak Patel

We'd love to hear your feedback.

00:16:48 Janak Patel

Thank you.

00:16:52 Voiceover

Thank you for joining this episode of the Empowering Tomorrow's Automotive Software Podcast.

00:16:56 Voiceover

Please leave a comment or review with your feedback or what you'd like to hear in future episodes.

00:17:01 Voiceover

To learn more about Automotive Embedded Systems and ETAS's capabilities, visit our website at ETAS.

00:17:07 Voiceover

That's ETAS.com.