Design Automation Challenges for Automotive Systems

As vehicular technology advances, vehicles become more connected and autonomous. Connectivity provides the capability to exchange information between vehicles, and autonomy provides the capability to make decisions and control each vehicle precisely. Connectivity and autonomy realize many evolutional applications, such as intelligent intersection management and cooperative adaptive cruise control. Electric vehicles are sometimes combined to create more use cases and business models. However, these intelligent features make the design process more complicated and challenging. In this talk, we introduce several examples of automotive design automation, which is required to improve the design quality and facilitate the design process. We mainly discuss the rising incompatibility issue, where different original equipment manufacturers and suppliers are developing systems, but the designs are confidential and thus incompatible with other players' designs. The incompatibility issue is especially critical with autonomous vehicles because no human driver resolves incompatible scenarios. We believe that techniques and experiences in electronic design automation can provide insights and solutions to automotive design automation.