Green Hills, Tata Elxsi partner to build a software-defined automotive cockpit

Santa Barbara, California based embedded safety and security provider Green Hills Software has partnered with information technology solutions vendor Tata Elxsi to build software-driven solutions for automotive cockpits.

The two companies showcased the solution, named as the Tata Elxsi eCockpit, at embedded world 2020 taking place at Nuremberg, Germany from 25 to 27 February.

The cockpit solution will address requirements in supporting infotainment, instrument clusters, and advanced driver assistance systems which will now be available on a single system on-chip.

Green Hills Software will support the eCockpit through integrity RTOS, an operating system built by Green Hills.  The Integrity OS will help the solution to consolidate different applications on a single processor.

The vehicle interface will be built on Bengaluru-based Tata Elxsi’s Autosar 4.3 classic platform. Autosar stands for “automotive open system architecture”, which is a global development partnership of automotive interested parties founded in 2003.

The integrity RTOS consists of a microkernel architecture (a microkernel architecture pattern consists of two types of architecture components mainly a core system and plug-in modules). This architecture will help software teams to safely and securely partition software running at different levels of importance.

“Tata Elxsi’s eCockpit, combined with Green Hills INTEGRITY Multivisor, is platform agnostic and it provides automotive makers with a complete single-ECU solution,” Dan Mender, Vice-president Business Development, Green Hills Software, said.

 Tata Elxsi, which serves in verticals such as broadcast and media, consumer products, healthcare and semiconductors gets a huge chunk of its revenue from the automotive segment which contributes approximately 50% of its total revenues. 

Two weeks ago, the company had announced that it has partnered with Tata Motors to develop the latter’s existing unified connected vehicle platform. The two companies had built a cloud-based internet of things (IoT) platform, which will give Tata Motors a common standard technology stack to support the entire range of vehicles.

In January Tata Elxsi announced the completion of an in-house autonomous AI (artificial intelligence)-based taxi, called RoboTaxi, which was created in partnership with AEye, an advanced artificial vision hardware provider. The concept was developed by utilising AEye’s iDAR platform and Tata Elxsi’s autonomous stack.

Although the automotive segment has been on a slowdown in India, Tata Elxsi reported a net profit jump of 13% in the third quarter ending December.