Trio to develop secure automotive platform
GuardKnox, NXP and Green Hills Software have announced a partnership to develop a secure automotive platform for the next generation of vehicle architecture.
GuardKnox’s consolidated, scalable, and high-performance solutions, based on NXP’s S32G vehicle network processors and the Green Hills INTEGRITY RTOS and development tools, will make up the automotive platform for global OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers.
GuardKnox claims to be the automotive industry’s first Cybertech Tier computing supplier and has partnered with NXP Semiconductors, which provides secure vehicle network processors, and Green Hills Software, which provides real time operating systems (RTOS).
The companies will collaborate to develop a secure automotive platform targeting next generation zonal E/E architecture, enabling commercial deployment for software-defined and service-oriented vehicles.
The platform is designed for global OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers to overcome current technological challenges such as integrating the hardware and software required for delivering advanced features and functionalities for the next generation of vehicles. The unified platform targets new zonal vehicle architectures that consolidate services that have traditionally been performed by multiple, dedicated functional domain platforms. This will simplify wiring harnesses, thereby lowering vehicle weight and cost and enable scalability and enhancements through software over the air updates.
“NXP’s collaboration with GuardKnox and Green Hills addresses key challenges of the automotive industry’s dramatic shift from horsepower to compute power to drive future software-centric vehicles,” said Brian Carlson, global marketing director for Vehicle Control and Networking Solutions at NXP. “This flexible automotive platform unleashes the innovation of the S32G vehicle network processor to meet the demanding processing and networking needs of domain and zonal vehicle architectures coupled with secure, service-oriented software that’s ready to accelerate automotive OEM and Tier 1 innovations.”
Based on NXP’s S32G vehicle network processor and the Green Hills Integrity safe and secure separation kernel and secure hypervisor (Multivisor), the platform will retain GuardKnox’s mixed-criticality features of service-oriented architecture (SOA) for a consolidated, scalable, dynamic, and secure-by-design platform, says the company.
Idan Nadav, co-founder and CSO of GuardKnox, commented: “By combining NXP’s . . . processor solutions and proven software and development tools from Green Hills, we are confident that our joint dynamic platform will empower OEMs with the freedom to evolve and usher in the next era of innovative automotive solutions”.
The platform is suited for a range of new vehicle services such as in-vehicle app stores, vehicle personalisation, immersive infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). It is designed to adapt to customer needs while remaining agnostic to network topology. Its flagship is a general purpose compute element with automotive network interfaces, serving as a baseline vehicle server. It can also serve as a high performance domain controller for today’s architectures, designed to host applications, provide extra services, additional functionality, and consolidation of other external hardware.
