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Consumer demand for electronics has now placed the automotive industry under pressure to drive innovation in cars much in the same way we have see innovation in the mobile device industry. There is now an expectation for automobile OEMs to deliver more innovation to market faster - with no increase in cost. This trend is driving up EE content in vehicles, requiring a reduction in design cycle time without passing the cost increases to the consumer. Intrinsic to EE content is the fact that it's impossible to compartmentalize design domains because they are connected in so many different ways. The traditional parallel flows to design software, electronics, networks, and the physical shape of the vehicle are mostly independent of each other and are not suited to deal with interdependency. Unfortunately, this often leads to lengthy design cycles, many iterations, and suboptimal designs.

The trend in automotive systems is towards an increasing complexity, where much of safety-critical functionality is implemented in software. The emerging safety automotive standard ISO-26262, will require safety cases where are clearly argued that a system is safe in all aspects, and where showing a timely behaviour is one necessary condition. Based on industrial experiences and actual research from as well automotive as aerospace domains, this paper shows how the safety requirements from ISO-26262 with respect to timing can be met even in a complex situation, such as enabled by AUTOSAR.

Software and electronic circuits are commonly used with mechanical components today. In the past, the design of functionally sufficient and robust mechanical components was always completed by experienced mechanical engineers. This is changing, however. The requirements of additional functionality and reduced price have led to the introduction of mechatronics - mechanical parts augmented with electronic hardware controlled by software. Designing and verifying such a system is a challenge that requires a change in methodology as two very different engineering disciplines collide. This paper illustrates a simulation-based design methodology for software controlled, electro-mechanical components using an autonomous mobile robot as an example. VHDL-AMS, the Analog-Mixed-Signal extension (IEEE 1076.1) of the digital hardware description language VDHL, was used as the main modeling language.