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Recent analysis shows that 90 percent of future innovation in Automotive will be based on electronics, for which a significant amount will be defined in embedded software [11]. The challenge for suppliers and vehicle manufacturers is to develop advanced software applications that offer optimized performance, while providing flexibility and reliability. To deal with the complexity cause by this shift to software defined functionality, the industry is adopting standards like AUTOSAR to provide a predefined interface between the MCU hardware and the software applications. In addition, to support the enhanced capabilities of those applications the industry is moving to more powerful multi-core MCU architectures, offering real-time and fail-safe capabilities. Moving forward, significant challenges will lie in testing the functionality and performance of such software applications running on top of the next generation multi-core architectures.

Recent surveys show that the number one issues in car electronics are cost reduction and better collaboration across the complex automotive design chain of IP providers, semiconductor providers, subsystem suppliers and system integrators (see [1]). With millions of lines of software code powering modern cars and the number of processors today already exceeding 80 (and further growing), software development becomes the critical component determining success of automotive development projects. Virtualization of hardware to enable software development – a technique already quite adopted in other application domains like wireless communication - is entering mainstream in automotive electronics as well. However, different areas of the car electronics require different modeling accuracy.