Panasonic Automotive Systems Co., Ltd. (PAS) and Arm, Ltd. today announced a strategic partnership aimed at standardizing automotive architecture for software-defined vehicles (SDVs). The new partnership will see PAS and Arm adopt and extend the VirtIO device virtualization framework to decouple automotive software development from hardware and accelerate automotive industry development cycles.

“Our partnership with Arm aims to promote the standardization of VirtIO and bring this industry reference standard to the next level,” said Masashige Mizuyama, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of PAS. “By combining the expertise and industry leadership of our organizations, we are confident that this collaboration will unlock software potential and serve as a crucial foundation for building the future of automotive technology towards SDV.”

The two companies share a common vision for creating a software stack with the flexibility to meet the current and future needs of automotive and have aligned on this through their participation in SOAFEE (Scalable Open Architecture For the Embedded Edge), an initiative bringing the automotive and software industries together to make the AI-enabled software-defined vehicle a reality.

“SDVs continue to be one of the most exciting opportunities for automakers today, but realizing this vision demands innovative approaches that allow software developers to begin their work before physical silicon is available,” said Dipti Vachani, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Automotive Line of Business at Arm. “Our partnership with PAS stems from both organizations’ active participation in SOAFEE and builds on a shared goal to reduce fragmentation in the industry through standardization, which will ultimately accelerate automotive development cycles for our partners.”

According to the partners, the automotive industry is increasingly consolidating electronic control units (ECUs) into more powerful cockpit domain controllers (CDCs) or high-performance computers (HPCs), making hypervisors and advanced chipsets more important than ever. However, many automakers and Tier 1 suppliers are challenged by vendor-specific proprietary interfaces, which leads to increased costs and delivery time when transitioning from one vendor solution to another.

PAS and Arm recognize the need to shift from a hardware-centric to a software-first development model to address these challenges. By standardizing the interfaces between the automaker and Tier 1 supplier software stacks and the underlying hypervisors and chipsets these run on, automotive partners can more easily adopt the latest generations of technology optimized for their needs and use cases.

This new partnership will involve several key initiatives: using VirtIO-based Unified HMI to standardize zonal architecture, ensuring environmental parity from cloud to car, and expanding VirtIO standardization.

PAS and Arm are leveraging VirtIO not only for virtualizing devices connected to the central ECUs like CDCs and HPCs but also for remote devices linked to zonal ECUs. The two organizations have demonstrated a proof-of-concept using PAS’s open-source remote GPU technology, Unified HMI, to implement a display zonal architecture built on Arm.

The architecture distributes GPU loads from the central ECU to multiple zonal ECUs, reducing heat generation and harness weight without altering applications running on the central ECU. The flexible partitioning in the Mali-G78AE GPU of zonal ECUs allocates dedicated hardware resources to different workloads, enabling deterministic graphics performance in a display zonal architecture.

PAS and Arm are collaborating to provide a SOAFEE Blueprint and reference implementation of this work, aiming to standardize emerging zonal architectures in the automotive industry.

To ensure cloud-to-car environmental parity, PAS’s vSkipGen operates on Arm Neoverse-based cloud servers. By maintaining the same Arm CPU architecture and VirtIO device virtualization framework, this initiative will ensure full environmental parity between cloud virtual hardware and automotive hardware. PAS and Arm will collaborate to implement VirtIO in virtual hardware, further bridging the gap between virtual and physical automotive systems.

Currently focused on cockpit use cases like Android Automotive and Automotive Grade Linux, PAS and Arm aim to broaden the VirtIO standards to encompass more automotive applications. This includes standardizing interfaces for real-time operating systems to decouple advanced driver assistance system software from hardware dependencies.