Software aids automotive electronics design

Freescale Semiconductor is helping OEMs manage the increasing complexity of automotive electronics design with the introduction of the Virtual Architect (VA) Tool Suite.

The software helps ensure synchronisation of design data along with product planning data.

As a result, automobile manufacturers can significantly reduce complexity, helping to reduce costly errors, improve accuracy of service diagnostics and lower warranty costs.

The first commercialised components of the suite include VA-Harness and VA-Complexity Management (CM).

These tools enable a complexity driven wire harness design process to help ensure that every orderable vehicle has the required set of wire harnesses and enables OEMs to intelligently collaborate to manage and reduce complexity.

As the first automobile manufacturer to adopt Freescale's VA Tool Suite, Chrysler is using the VA-Harness and VA-CM in addition to working with Freescale on other components of the suite expected to be released over the next 12 months.

As car companies add more electronic features for differentiation, they face not only system complexity but also product complexity.

This transition has put automobile manufacturers increasingly in the role of system integrator.

Freescale's VA Tool Suite allows automotive OEMs to be true system integrators managing complexity and defining performance-driven Electrical/Electronic (EE) architectures to enable smoother integration of systems.

In the typical design environment, each domain (sensors, wiring harnesses, communications busses, electronic control units, actuators and so on) operates semi-autonomously, and thus a change in the architectural design of a component in one domain typically required time-consuming manual coordination between engineers of different domains.

The VA Tool Suite was developed to address these common EE design issues that plague vehicles at launch.

It enables the system engineer to specify the vehicle level EE performance requirements, communicate and collaborate with other EE engineering design domains and conduct performance requirement validations.

This helps to ensure synchronisation of design specifications (harness, network and ECU) for the vehicle, reducing the likelihood of costly errors.

The VA Tool Suite is being launched from Freescale's Virtual Garage program, which was created to expand Freescale's solution offerings beyond silicon and related software.

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