Hypervisor based approach for integrated cockpit solutions

Rapid advances in SoC architectures have resulted in a shift in the automotive industry to integrate in-vehicle entertainment (infotainment) and selected ADAS functionality onto a single system, reducing system cost and payload. Standalone electronic control units (ECU) for surround-view (SRV),rear-view camera (RVC), heads-up display (HUD) and digitally instrument cluster are being substituted by integrated cockpit systems. Integrating the standalone ECUs into a single system represents a dichotomy of safety versus generality. Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are expected to be fault tolerant and are traditionally managed by a safety-certified RTOS. Infotainment applications have fewer constraints on safety but stress on interoperability. Thus, infotainment applications are driven by open-source libraries and are managed by a high-level operating systems (HLOS). To achieve an integrated cockpit system while adhering to each systems constraints, a hypervisor based solution is proposed. The hypervisor facilitates running multiple operating systems simultaneously, partitioning of system resources and providing virtualization of shared peripherals. The result of the proposed architecture is an integrated cockpit system with ADAS and infotainment components isolated from each other, and the ability to run multiple HLOS sharing the peripherals.