A Straight Road to Automotive Electronic Design …

Well, my recent Blog post on my day at the SAE Congress was noticed by Gabe Moretti and he commented in his article “EDA and the car: are we missing the bus?” that he had learned about Synopsys’ growing footprint in automotive electronic design via its acquisition of Analogy and its Saber product (and, of course, the MAST language), but that he had not “heard about them since”. Well, I checked around internally, and actually, Synopsys has been quite active and engaged in the automotive space – here’s an update on our presence in the automotive industry:

• Saber (and MAST!) continues to flourish in the automotive space, having been adopted at major OEMs and throughout their supply chains. The Saber suite of products have served designers of automotive systems and components very well by providing virtual system design capability across multiple domains; robust design methodology to address reliability requirements; and  the largest standardized library of models in both OpenMAST and VHDL-AMS to address automotive designers’ needs. Saber’s user base continues to grow nicely, a telling reflection of its utility and value.
• Our virtual platform approach, based upon Innovator, is a great fit for development & validation of embedded software in advance of RTL. With the exponential growth in the lines of code utilized in an automobile, this is gaining more attention at our automotive accounts. Also, the effects of TLM-2.0 standardization become very visible. Customers are asking for TLM-2.0 compliant processor models, which clearly shifts the barriers between the different virtual platform solutions, which traditionally had been separated by application domains.
• Our rapid prototyping solution, composed of the Synplify™ Family (FPGA synthesis) and Confirma™ hardware based prototyping, gives us an attractive solution that fits the needs of automotive companies to develop and test software with stable RTL; a paradigm complementary to the virtual platform flow mentioned earlier.
• Synopsys has grown its involvement with key organizations within the automotive community. We are active members of the FlexRay™ consortium, in which we have done significant work aiding our customers design vs. the growing demands of in-vehicle networking. We also work closely with working groups within both SAE and VDA, each of which is an influential body in the world of automotive design.

So, despite not being a member of AUTOSAR, Synopsys has neither abandoned nor ignored the needs of contemporary automotive designers – in fact, we look forward to growing our strong technical relationships in the industry, and exploring new avenues in which we can aid them in building products of the highest quality.

Looks to me like a pretty straight road for that bus we have not missed 🙂