What is the SDV Alliance and Why You Should Care

During the past years, we have been observing the rapid increase in the number of vehicle features, on par with the number of ECUs, and we see more and more software taking the wheel, being a decisive factor for most while choosing their new vehicle. During this time, our cars are becoming increasingly more connected with the outside world and the internet, with OTA, V2X features, huge infotainment screens and more ADAS systems than we can count.

What is the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV)?

With these new features, a paradigm shift is being observed, which leads to the concept of the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV). The software of the car is one of its most important features, yet, it becomes outdated too soon in the lifetime of the vehicle, with all the new features coming out. The idea behind SDV is to permanently connect the vehicle to update it with new features and improvements, while communicating with the cloud to gather data and improve its functionality. This yields many advantages, such as increasing the number of vehicle updates througout its lifecycle (including new features to the infotainment, which allow your car to remain technologically relevant for way longer) and enhancing its safety (via permanent monitoring and detection of issues in real time and updating its ADAS features).

Of course, this comes with innovation in many domains, and the hardware architecture is no exception. The most drastic feature hardware-wise is the transition from the flat architecture of an ever-increasing number of ECUs to a smaller number, yet more powerful number, by grouping these ECUs into zones of powerful ECUs, resorting in many instances to virtualization. In essence, simplifying the architecture and leaving enough hardware capacity for new software features.

The SDV Alliance to Make it Happen

The software must accompany this paradigm shift, enabling the upgradability of the software, communication with the cloud, in essence, behaving pretty much like your smartphone, always connected, while still being a car. The question is, what are industry players doing to make the leap into the Software Defined Vehicle happen? This is where the SDV Alliance comes in.

The SDV Alliance aims to harmonize the collaboration between the automotive standards to minimize the possible issues that occur during automotive development, unifying the technologies, methodologies and agree on what makes an SDV vehicle, while maximizing the capabilities for the development of as many SDV features as possible.

The SDV Alliance is a mix of both automotive standards known to many of us and the open source community, along with many partners. There are four key players to this:

• COVESA (Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance) - An open alliance (formerly known as GENIVI) with develops open standards and technologies (including open source software) for connected vehicles, such as Linux services, middleware and open application layer interfaces.

• Eclipse SDV - A working group within the Eclipse Foundation to aid the development of automotive software for the SDV era, with a big emphasis on open source. This includes tooling for application development (tooling and CI/CD workflows), management (communication middleware, messaging and vehicle abstraction and digital twin) and runtime (operating systems, hypervisors and containers).

• AUTOSAR - The automotive partnership to standardize the automotive E/E software architecture, which you more than likely know about by now.

• SOAFEE (Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge) - An industry initiative to develop a shared platform for SDV development, including an open set of standards to enable cloud native software development, from cloud to the edge, and a platform to maximize environmental parity and sustainability.

SDV Alliance in Action

This collaboration is being showcased already in many embedded software fairs worldwide. From the whitepaper SDV Alliance Integration Blueprint (opens in a new tab), we can see two HPCs (High Performance Computers), where HPC1 runs on-board applications (via the Eclipse Velocitas SDV runtime, a scalable, modular and open source toolchain that enables the development of containerized and non-containerized vehicle applications) AI processing algorithms and the HCP2 representing a zonal architecture, which connects multiple smaller ECUs (running Classic AUTOSAR stacks) that logically contribute to the same goal. These zonal computers are then responsible for converting the signals received into AUTOSAR signals and communicating them to each of the respective ECUs. But how is this process carried out?

Due to the different sets of standards, this poses one of the biggest hurdles. For that, a KUKSA (from Eclipse SDV) data broker forwards the communication signals, which have been harmonized into a single format, namely COVESA VSS (Vehicle Signal Specification) in this case. KUKSA then acts as a "gateway" between the different communication interfaces / zonal ECUs and the vehicle applications, translating them on both sides and enabling the most-favoured technological stacks to be used.

The VSS from COVESA defines a structure and catalog of vehicle signals, namely the sensors and actuator data that circulates on the networks of the vehicle. This HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) enables both the reusability of the standardized catalog of signals and also enables the testing of such signals via simulation, detaching part of the development from hardware.

Additionally, we can see one impacting feature on the left, the SOAFEE EWAOL, which aims to provide a virtualized environment imitating the behavior of the ECU while being in the cloud (achieving environment parity). This allows for remote collaboration, creating and modifying test setups without depending on physical infrastructure, speeding the development process while keeping costs low.

SDV Integration Blueprint from the SDV Alliance Integration Blueprint (opens in a new tab)

In the picture, you also see the remaining part of the integration blueprint, the environment for rapid prototyping provided by digital.auto playground. It allows for fast development (via integrated widgets) and testing of SDV applications through the standardized APIs.

Closing Notes

Overall, the SDV will be a new stepping stone for automotive vehicles, coming with more challenges and hurdles for all of us who take part in the automotive industry, but this will result in the future of automobility and new, greater challenges for us to tackle and be excited about!

Author: Micael Coutinho (opens in a new tab)

References:

• SDV Alliance Integration Blueprint (opens in a new tab)