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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, November 26, 2007

It’s a good thing… but what sort of good thing?

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I’ve been pondering what I learned at the recent Automotive Electronics Congress about Autosar. Which in retrospect seems to be; not very much I went looking to find if Autosar is really the future of embedded software design in the automotive industry, and indeed I heard a good presentation on the subject. Which told me that the concept of having well-defined hardware/software interfaces is coming along nicely, that compliant tools are becoming available, and all those good things.

What I didn’t get much more of a feel for was, what do the participants in Autosar think it’s actually for? I have at different times thought I have heard a number of different messages on that account. Is it about improving the quality of software written within an organisation by introducing more rigour and structure to the software design process? And thereby starting to get some kind of grip on the automotive industry’s horrendous software version-control problem? Or is it about promoting re-use of software modules within an organisation? Or, allowing simpler sub-contracting of software creation, with known APIs to work to? Even, perhaps, a market in traded IP for common software functions? (I grant you that’s a bit far-fetched in the automotive context.) I’m really no clearer if the main thing that users expect to get out of the venture is one of these angles, or something completely different.

What did emerge from a panel session at the same conference was an apparent frustration with the some of the structures of the automotive industry when it comes to taking on board trends such as Autosar-based design. To summarise a discussion point that went back and forth for some time; there’s little point having a carefully-defined hardware/software interface and the facility to separately source the hardware and software components of an ECU, if the procurement remains in the hands of a systems that only recognises, and wants to buy – an ECU as a single entity. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

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