Safety Dominates Agenda in DAC’s Automotive Track

The connected car movement is in full bloom, making headlines in the trade media on how the cutting-edge electronics will transform the twenty-first century driving experience. However, a closer look at the Internet of cars juggernaut shows that safety and security of the networked vehicle are still a major stumbling block.

Design Automation Conference (DAC) — June 7-11, 2015

The Automotive Track at the upcoming Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco to be held on June 7-11, 2015 just affirms how crucial safety and security are going to be in the connected automotive platforms. Another prominent highlight of the DAC program for automotive seems that it’s evenly divided between hardware and software aspects of car safety and security.

For instance, Jeffrey Massimilla, Chief of Cybersecurity at GM, is going to talk about cyber threats to connected cars. He will also join a technology chat along with Craig Smith, the author of Car Hacker’s Manual, and John McElroy, the host of Autoline Daily, the first webcast of automotive industry news and analysis. The session will provide a detailed treatment of how connectivity features like Bluetooth, GPS, LTE and Wi-Fi create entry points for hackers.

John McElroy will host a chat on connected car technologies

Jeffrey Owens, CTO of Delphi Automotive, will elaborate on how electronics and design automation are playing a critical role in shaping the future of automotive in another keynote titled as “The Design of Innovation That Drives Tomorrow.”

Next, DAC’s Automotive Track brings ISO 26262 certification to the technology limelight; a whole session is dedicated to the nitty and gritty of robust chip solutions for connected vehicles. Maik Herzog of Infineon Technologies AG will be the keynote speaker at this session about the physical design of automotive ICs, which will also encompass advanced verification tools for the brave new world of ISO 26262.

Infineon’s EDA expert Maik Herzog will talk about the brave new world of ISO 26262

There are going to be three conference sessions. The first one is about modeling, simulation and testing in automotive embedded systems. The session will feature three talks from Infineon’s Moomen Chaari, Kenji Nishimiya of Honda R&D and Armin Wasicek from University of California at Berkeley.

The second conference session is about energy efficient, safe and secure automotive software and systems. The session features six speakers and 21 authors, and will present new results on embedded automotive systems, architectures and algorithms. For instance, there will be a talk about a novel algorithm related to heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems for improving the energy management of electric vehicles.

The third and final session will cover the different facets of automotive embedded software. Cars have now several millions of lines of software code that run on a highly distributed architecture consisting of as many as 100 electronic control units (ECUs) connected by a heterogeneous communication subsystem consisting of CAN, FlexRay and Ethernet among others. The session will discuss various aspects of automotive software—model-based design, component integration and timing analysis.

Majeed Ahmad is former Editor-in-Chief of EE Times Asia and author of six books about wireless and smartphones. His latest book The Next Web of 50 Billion Devices: Mobile Internet’s Past, Present and Future is about the Internet of Things and connected wearable devices.