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Instrument clusters that display all information on a TFT-LCD screen, also known as reconfigurable instrument clusters, have become the new trend in automotive interiors. DENSO mass-produced the world's first reconfigurable instrument cluster in 2008. To satisfy customer requirements, large quantities of resources were required. Coupled with an iterative process due to requirement changes, development costs became very high. Reducing development costs was vital in order to expand the reconfigurable instrument cluster products line. One solution was to use existing human machine interface (HMI) tools. However, most HMI tools are geared toward software developers and not graphic artists. Furthermore, each tool has its own unique method for image and scene creation, creating an ineffective and sometimes difficult environment for artists familiar with industry-leading computer graphics (CG) software to learn and use the tools.

In recent years, the powertrain system is becoming bigger and more sophisticated than ever, and it is very important that new powertrain systems shall be timely developed just when the market required. In this kind of new system, the quality in particular will be an important factor on the vehicle evaluation issue. With this objective in mind, DENSO has been working on the following challenges, such as the development of key technology, the improvement of quality assurance system, and engineer education to realize them. This reports a general idea on these quality management activities.

In the last decade, radar-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have improved safety of transportation. Today, the standardization of ADAS established by New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) is expected to expand its market globally. One of the key technologies of ADAS is the rear-side monitoring system such as Blind Spot Warning (BSW) and Closing Vehicle Warning (CVW). It is required to expand its detection range so that it can monitor not only nearside targets for BSW, but farther targets for CVW. These applications can be achieved using two radar sensors installed at rear-side corner of the vehicle. However, the expanded detection range causes undesirable target detections and decreases target recognition performance. In this paper, a novel solution to improve the performance using DCMP(Directional-Constrained Minimization of Power)-based Beamspace technology using Two-frequency continuous wave (2FCW also known as FSK) is introduced.

We propose a verification method in the field of automotive control systems integrating the concepts of Formal Methods with testing, aiming at efficient and reliable software development. Although Formal Methods are believed to provide the benefits of their rigorous nature and their inherent capability of automation, only limited cases are known where Formal Methods were applied in system and software development, in practice, due to two major difficulties: appropriate abstraction in modeling and scalability in automated reasoning. Focusing on testing on the other hand, there is the difficulty of selecting reasonable set of tests for given verification objectives. In order to overcome these difficulties, our approach is to present verification criteria for testing to appropriately cover the property with the help of the Formal Method concepts.

As automotive electronic systems aiming for a safe and secure automobile society continue to develop, the control specifications of the ECU are becoming increasingly complex. When attempting to validate control specifications that cooperatively control different control specifications, control specification developers must consider various validation viewpoints. They narrow down the validation viewpoints based on rules from past experience, describe timing charts, and validate the specifications. However, due to complicated specifications, empirical rules do not pass, and specification mismatches are often found after actual systems completion. On the other hand, a block diagram simulator is a tool to verify control specifications. Since these tools are aimed at modeling and verifying the system design, it is efficient to describe how to implement the system. However, first it is necessary to verify the consistency between the model and the specifications.

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.