vECU generation

Supporting suppliers and OEMs in the creation of virtual control units

Bertrandt enables seamless vECU generation as an integral part of your development pipeline—accelerating testing, improving quality, and reducing dependency on hardware.

ECU Virtualization plays a crucial role in software defined vehicles development & testing. When you start utilizing vECUs in the early stages of development, you end up saving throughout the entire value chain. You will have a better software quality early-on due to early testing, rathe than waiting for the hardware to be available to start with your system tests.

CI/CD

We believe that a vECU should be a “by-product” of the development pipeline with every new release, so that a comparable vECU is always available alongside the ECU flashware.

The quality and speed of your development will increase significantly, because every commit by a software developer can be immediately tested for possible effects on the overall project.

As experts, we can also optimize existing development processes, provide support in setting up new CI/CD frameworks not tied to individual software manufacturers.

Virtualization Levels

Level-0 vECU: Exclusively a model of the control unit (e.g. MATLAB Simulink)

Level-1 vECU: Productive application software. Suited for maturity level statements at SWE level

Level-2 vECU: Includes Level-1, in addition to productive middleware and parts of the BSW stack.

Level-3 vECU: Includes most part of the real ECU, except for hardware dependent drivers.

Level-4 vECU: Testing the target compiled artifact. However, no real-time capability

From a Real Target to a vECU

The most commonly used virtual ECUs are Level-3 virtual ECUs. Take the above AUTOSAR system as an example, We can support you in virtualizing hardware drivers and the virtual bus, as well as creating models for sensors and actuators within the system. The resulting virtual ECU can be seamlessly integrated into your system testing and incorporated into your CI/CD pipeline for continuous validation.

And what about HPC control units?

HPC ECUs (High Performance Computing Electronic Control Units) provide an ideal basis for virtualization and emulation of the SoC (System-on-Chip). Modern HPCs are often based on powerful SoCs on which a hypervisor is used as an abstraction layer. This enables the parallel operation of multiple virtual machines (VMs), including Linux derivatives, AUTOSAR Adaptive and Classic components. Thanks to this architecture, not only is an abstraction layer above the SoC possible, but also the emulation of the entire SoC – for example, in cloud environments of large hyperscalers such as AWS.