How fast can Germany shift to software-defined vehicles?

BY EMMA RIVERSO, EDITOR, SEMICONDUCTOR ENGINEERING.

It’s being called “China speed,” defined by the accelerated rate at which software-defined vehicles can be designed, manufactured, and updated with new features. And nowhere is this hitting harder and forcing more profound changes than in Germany, Europe’s leading automotive market.

Rather than relying solely on customized electronic control units, SDVs use a combination of specialized and generic processors and memories wherever it makes sense to embed functionality into software. Tesla was one of the pioneers of this approach, but it has snowballed ever since Chinese automakers first entered the market in the early 2000s. Since then, even latecomers have managed to pick up share and speed. Xiaoping Motors (XPENG), founded in 2014, introduced its first vehicle in just four years. It delivered 190,000 vehicles in 2024. Li Auto, founded in 2015, introduced its first vehicle in 2019. It produced 501,000 vehicles in 2024.

Collectively, China produced 31.3 million vehicles in 2024. Germany, in contrast, manufactured just 4.1 million passenger cars in 2024.

“The Asian OEMs are much faster in getting a car on the street,” said Roland Jancke, head of department for Design Methodology at Fraunhofer IIS/EAS. “The question is how we, as Western Europe or the Western world, can keep up with that speed. How can we get faster? One of the answers is automotive systems engineering. This is exactly the answer to speed up the development process. The automotive development cycle is still seven years from the start of the project until the start of production, due to the old development processes. But there has to be more speed. It has to get faster. What does automotive systems engineering mean? It means that the overall development process is driven by a model of the overall project. You start at the very beginning with model-based development, which is a different approach than is done today. Today, when a project is started, it is first split up into several sub-projects and this is given to different teams who don’t know what the others are doing, or don’t have too much interaction with each other.”

Germany is still the European powerhouse for automotive, but concerns about its global competitiveness stem from its traditional role as a producer of hardware-defined vehicles. OEMs like Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW have a standard way of operating and building out hardware-defined vehicles, typically taking years to test and produce new models, said Hanno Wolff, executive director of automotive business development at Synopsys.

Those OEMs that have shifted into SDVs have done so via workforce development, building out software departments within existing organizational structures, or through collaboration with Chinese companies. For example, Volkswagen partnered with XPENG to introduce China Electrical Architecture, a zonal electrical/electronic architecture.

Software-defined hardware doesn’t mean different functions are actually written in software. Even though running software on a generic processor adds greater flexibility and shorter time-to-market, it’s slower than customized silicon, not as energy-efficient, and less secure.

“When the feature is hampered by latency or the computational aspect of the software side, that’s where you draw the line,” said Mike Yeager, senior vice president and general manager for Ethernet solutions at Infineon. “It’s not always clear where that delineation is. But if the computational cycles that occur from compiling and running software are prohibitive, or noticeable by the user, it’s not going to work. The software definition is there. It’s just what gets put into hardware may be different. The combination of the two really is what works best. You can still program it in, and you can do over-the-air updates, but you’d better be empowering the hardware to do a lot of the work.”

Others agree. “The way we look at it is that it’s more about enabling an infrastructure when it comes to automotive, pushing software updates and new feature upgrades even after the vehicle goes out of the dealership,” said Suraj Gajendra, vice president of automotive products for software and solutions at Arm. “But when it comes to software-defined hardware core design, the fundamental aim is to ensure that the hardware being developed is aware of what software application it needs to run. At the same time, there is a lot more that is purpose-built.”

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Source: www.semiengineering.com