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Vehicle manufacturers are suffering from increasing expenses for fixing software issues. This fact is mainly driving their desire to use mobile communication channels for doing Software Updates Over The Air (SOTA). Software updates today are typically done at vehicle service stations by connecting the vehicles’ electronic network via the On Board Diagnostic (OBD) interface to a service computer. These operations are done under the control of trained technicians. SOTA means that the update process must get handled by the driver. Two critical aspects need to get considered when doing SOTA at Electronic Brake Control (EBC) systems. Both will determine the acceptance of SOTA by legal authorities and by the passengers: The safety and security of the vehicle The availability of the vehicle for the passengers The security aspect includes the necessity to protect the vehicle and the manufacturers IP from unwanted attacks.

The increasing requirements for body features - for greater memory size and better controller performance on the one hand, and for energy consumption on power down on the other - make new concepts necessary. Higher performance and increasing features in semiconductor industries typically lead to the use of smaller structures. The latest structures being seen in automotive silicon devices are 0.18μ and 0.13μ. With these structures it is possible to achieve the requirements for performance and size of integrated memories. The drawback of these technologies is a dramatic increase of leakage currents, especially when such devices are getting hot. The paper will describe what can be done to get rid of such high leakage currents and how this was implemented in the latest 16/32 bit microcontroller family XC2000 from Infineon. There are two ways to get rid of leakage current.

Connecting mobile communication channels to vehicles’ networks is currently attracting engineers in a wide range. Herein the desire of vehicle manufacturers to remotely execute software updates over the air (SOTA) within electronic control units (ECU) is probably the field of highest attention at the moment. Today software updates are typically done at vehicle service stations and connection the vehicles electronic network via the onboard diagnosis (OBD) interface to a service computer. Herby the duration of the update is invisible to the user, as this happens during standard service appointments. With introduction of SOTA, these updates become very convenient to the customer and can lead to higher customer satisfaction levels. SOTA can be made transparent to the user however the method of implementation can affect the user experience.

Vehicle manufacturers are challenged by rising costs for vehicle recalls. A major part of the costs are caused by software updates. This paper describes a feasibility study on how to implement software update over the air (SOTA) in light vehicles. The differences and special challenges in the automotive environment in comparison to the cellular industry will be explained. Three key requirements focus on the drivers’ acceptance and thus are crucial for the vehicle manufacturers: SOTA must be protected against malicious attacks. SOTA shall interfere as little as possible with the availability of a vehicle. Long update processes with long vehicle downtimes or even complete fails must be avoided. The functional safety of the vehicle during operation may not be limited in any way The study gives options how those objectives can be achieved. It considers the necessary security measures and describes the required adaptations of the board-net architectures both on software and hardware level.

Currently major investments by Tier1 and vehicle manufacturers are made to implement and optimize safety critical automotive systems according to the ISO standard 26262 “Road vehicles functional safety”. The ISO 26262 standard describes methods to detect the safety critical faults of a system designed according to the rules of functional safety, but it does not describe how an actual implementation shall look like. Development of ISO 26262 standard compliant systems concentrates on optimizing and improving cost and performance in a competitive environment. More competitive and practical implementations use fewer additional hardware and software resources for safety control and error detection and have higher performance with less overhead. Microcontrollers already have implemented many safety related hardware functions, so called safety mechanisms to mitigate safety critical risks.

Vehicle manufacturers are suffering from increasing expenses for fixing software issues. This fact is mainly driving their desire to use mobile communication channels for doing Software Updates Over The Air (SOTA). Software updates today are typically done at vehicle service stations by connecting the vehicles’ electronic network via the On Board Diagnostic (OBD) interface to a service computer. These operations are done under the control of trained technicians. SOTA means that the update process must get handled by the driver. Two critical aspects need to get considered when doing SOTA at Electronic Brake Control (EBC) systems. Both will determine the acceptance of SOTA by legal authorities and by the passengers: The safety and security of the vehicle The availability of the vehicle for the passengers The security aspect includes the necessity to protect the vehicle and the manufacturers IP from unwanted attacks.