- Admin
- June 4, 2025
Case Study
Automotive-Ready Software Solutions on Multicore Arm Architecture
Client
US-based automotive chip company
Scope
This features a multicore RADAR system-on-chip (SoC) with secure multistage boot deployed for use in Level 1 and Level 3 advanced driver Assistance systems (ADAS). The software stack involves a customized automotive ethernet stack and proprietary inter-core RPC mechanism for effective data transfer and usage of both digital and analog subsystems.
Ignitarium has extensive experience qualifying customized software stacks and frameworks running on multicore Arm-based ASICs (Arm Cortex-M0+, Arm Cortex-R52, and so on). We offer software architectural services during the design phase, along with a FuSa gap analysis of existing software frameworks running on Arm Cortex-based designs to help ensure compliance with ISO 26262 standards and audit requirements.
Challenges
Ignitarium has been selected as a FuSa compliance solution provider for the deployed software stack. The functional and safety requirements for the system were analysed to provide a gap report. The framework and software modules which required restructuring for compliance were made, and verification was done on a system level to meet compliance requirements.
To achieve complete code coverage for automotive software audits, our team overcame challenges posed by the implementation of multicore architectures. Leveraging their expertise, the team utilized RPC mechanisms for internal cores (Arm Cortex-R5/Arm Cortex-M0) and coupled with base peripherals like JTAG/UART to collect coverage data effectively.
Solution
The Arm processor inbuilt safety features designed for automotive and other safety-critical applications helped to meet the requirements of ISO 26262 through fault detection, error correction, and redundancy mechanisms. The Arm Coresight-based debug architecture provides a comprehensive debug environment, which facilitates easy and flexible integration with most of the leading code analysis tools, which is essential for static, dynamic and cyclomatic analysis. These features of Arm cores, coupled with the extensive CI/CD expertise of Ignitarium, helped in setting up automation pipelines and validation of bootloader (Pre-Silicon), customized frameworks (post-silicon), and other software block with minimal lead time.
The Arm Cortex-M0+ cores employed for the solution come industry ready to meet the requirements of automotive use cases for an HSM core, which also made development and integration with FuSA libraries seamless.
Secure software loading is achieved using Cortex-M0+ since the core meets the requirements of the HSM Bosch spec. With the use of helper functions, we were able to validate the ROM boot code.
In the SoC, the functional safety CPU is implemented using the Arm core. Depending upon the processing requirements to meet safety goals, different Arm cores were used (Cortex-M0+, Cortex-R52) on different chip variants. Our team was responsible for the static analysis, as well as coding of the FuSa library. We were also involved in power management control and regulation of the voltage/power range of the SoC.
ARM IP
• Cortex-A
• Cortex-M
• Cortex-R
• Development Board
Application Area
• Automotive
• Autonomous Vehicles
• Digital Cockpit (IVI)
• Embedded
• Functional Safety
