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The AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR) Development Partnership has published early 2008 the specifications Release 3.0 [1], with a prime focus on the overall architecture, basic software, run time environment, communication stacks and methodology. Heavy developments have taken place in the OEM and supplier community to deliver AUTOSAR loaded cars on the streets starting 2008 [2]. The 2008 achievements have been: Improving the specifications in order to secure the exploitation for body, chassis and powertrain applications Adding major features: safety related functionalities, OBD II and Telematics application interfaces.

To fulfil the increasing requirements of electric/electronic architectures in automotive environments new concepts for future Electronic Control Units (ECU) are needed. Novel architectures offer much higher potential in terms of performance compared to higher clock rates in standard microcontroller devices. The following contribution discusses the performance benefits of new concepts as well as advantages in early development phases. We focus on two systems: A central body controller and a gateway system. Both are realized on reconfigurable hardware. In comparison to microcontrollers the FPGA technology offers the opportunity of task parallelization and partial dynamically reconfiguration. These novel architectures demand new tool flows and standards which will be also addressed in this paper.

Reductions of hardware costs as well as implementations of new innovative functions are the main drivers of today's automotive electronics. Indeed more and more resources are spent on adapting existing solutions to different environments. At the same time, due to the increasing number of networked components, a level of complexity has been reached which is difficult to handle using traditional development processes. The automotive industry addresses this problem through a paradigm shift from a hardware-, component-driven to a requirement- and function-driven development process, and a stringent standardization of infrastructure elements. One central standardization initiative is the AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR). AUTOSAR was founded in 2003 by major OEMs and Tier1 suppliers and now includes a large number of automotive, electronics, semiconductor, hard- and software companies.