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Vehicle electronics systems will continue to become more complex and larger in scale. This causes their development to be conducted without control. As a result, system development involves things becoming intertwined with each other, like spaghetti. This has made it extremely difficult to develop an entire electronics system coherently and efficiently, from functional architecture down to physical architecture. There is thus a need to reform the development style of the electronics field to a style which will continuously and efficiently generate high-quality products. This will be achieved by dividing development into functions and components. Function development refer to developing functions that OEMs want to equip in the vehicles, that is, “what to make. Components development refers to “how to realize these components. For this activity, it is necessary to promote and accelerate platform-based development looking down at entire electronics systems.

With the development of car electronics, increasing numbers of ECUs are mounted in vehicles and “function integration” and “unification of mechanical and electronic” are moving forward. In order for DENSO to supply customers with the optimum of these increasingly complex products, we use simulations from upstream processes, where there is a lack of design information, and are proceeding with the construction of virtual development environments in order to create products. This paper discusses these development techniques.

A new development environment is required where conflict between control systems is minimized, where processing can be executed while maintaining independence between systems, and where quality can be assured easily. This environment must enable flexibility in software layouts to accommodate software changes during the development process and the parallel development of multiple derivative systems. We have developed virtualization technology (virtual CPU), which allows the execution of system control with a single CPU without conflict between systems. An outstanding virtual CPU architecture that we have developed allows us to execute multiple real-time control tasks with the hardware scheduler, and we have developed hardware that extends the management of address space and interrupt handling, making it possible for a single CPU to be configured as multiple CPUs. Also, we have implemented a bus system that reduces interference between threads.

Along with the evolution of vehicle electronic systems from independent control in each domain system to the integration control of the whole vehicle system, ECU systems have become increasingly complicated and large-scale. This has made it extremely difficult to develop the entire system coherently and efficiently from the functional level down to implementation level. On the other hand, the development methodology focusing on single ECU system used today has been facing an additional challenge because of increasingly strict requirements for safety design based on multi-ECU systems. To address these challenges, we have been working on developing virtual development of Engine ECU by modeling technology. In order to achieve optimum electronic systems, it is necessary to build many real devices and evaluate the performance of systems. However, it is also becoming necessary to build virtual devices because of the increasingly complicated and large-scale systems.