Towards a RISC-V Open Platform for Next-generation Automotive ECUs

TL;DR

This paper proposes an open hardware and software platform based on RISC-V and multi-OS architecture to enhance automotive ECUs, aiming to reduce costs and complexity in next-generation vehicles.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-criticality multi-OS architecture utilizing open hardware and open-source tech for automotive ECUs, demonstrating RISC-V's suitability for safety-critical applications.

Findings

RISC-V processor shows comparable real-time features to COTS Arm Cortex-R.

The architecture supports safety-critical AUTOSAR OS and advanced Linux functionalities.

Open hardware reduces costs and complexity in automotive ECUs.

Abstract

The complexity of automotive systems is increasing quickly due to the integration of novel functionalities such as assisted or autonomous driving. However, increasing complexity poses considerable challenges to the automotive supply chain since the continuous addition of new hardware and network cabling is not considered tenable. The availability of modern heterogeneous multi-processor chips represents a unique opportunity to reduce vehicle costs by integrating multiple functionalities into fewer Electronic Control Units (ECUs). In addition, the recent improvements in open-hardware technology allow to further reduce costs by avoiding lock-in solutions. This paper presents a mixed-criticality multi-OS architecture for automotive ECUs based on open hardware and open-source technologies. Safety-critical functionalities are executed by an AUTOSAR OS running on a RISC-V processor, while the Linux OS executes more advanced functionalities on a multi-core ARM CPU. Besides presenting the implemented stack and the communication infrastructure, this paper provides a quantitative gap analysis between an HW/SW optimized version of the RISC-V processor and a COTS Arm Cortex-R in terms of real-time features, confirming that RISC-V is a valuable candidate for running AUTOSAR Classic stacks of next-generation automotive MCUs.