Driving automotive Innovation – comprehensive design
Burkhard Huhnke
Vice President Automotive Strategy
SYNOPSYS
Abstract
What an exciting time we live in: self-driving cars, fully electric and always connected to the internet to provide the user a seamless transportation experience. Many announcements around the mobile phone on wheels have been made. Some of the most exciting innovations happening in our cars: cars are becoming our co-pilots as intelligent technologies make them safe and secure, more comfortable, and more autonomous. And with full connectivity the car becomes the new gold mine, a big data collector processing real time traffic data and millions of miles per day.
To enable smart, connected and autonomous vehicles, the car’s electronic architecture, its supporting soft and hardware design and release processes must be adjusted. Any failure in the field results in very high cost and liability to the car manufacturer. Requirements for a robust, comprehensive design of a fault tolerant system must be newly formulated. A holistic view of the system failure rate along the supply chain, lifecycle of automotive development and production is necessary. Consequently, robustness, safety, and security of self driving systems must be significantly increased and be monitored continuously.
Robust design begins in the early phase of car concepts. Automotive IP centers of excellence have been created, to ensure automotive compliant intellectual property for faster, smarter, low-energy chips reducing risk and development time. Automotive SoC design is meeting the highest safety integrity levels (ASIL) providing ADAS IP as design basis for the new advanced driver assistants architecture. By providing a simulation platform based on the processor models, early virtual prototyping, emulation, and functional verification from modelling to test bench deployment becomes possible. Software experts will be required to ensure fault tolerant, highly reliable, functionally safe and secure software along the automotive lifecycle.
Biography
Dr. Burkhard Huhnke is the Vice President of Automotive Strategy at Synopsys. He joined Synopsys earlier this year. Prior to Synopsys, he was SVP of Product Innovation & E-Mobility at VW, based in Silicon Valley. He was responsible for synchronizing VW's innovation activities and alliances to identify new concept ideas, business models and partners in the US and had end-to-end ownership of the electric vehicle platform in North America. Prior to that, he held several positions both in the US and Germany, including Senior GM, Electronics System Integration and Whole Vehicle Integration. Dr. Huhnke studied electrical engineering, at the University of Braunschweig. His dissertation about optical distance measurement was awarded with the International Measurement Prize.
Dr. Huhnke serves as Research Fellow the Hult Business School in San Francisco, and is a member of the Board of Advisors at the College of Engineering at University of Tennessee Knoxville and at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at University of Tennessee Chattanooga.
