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Integration scenarios for ECU software become more complicated, as more constraints with regards to timing, safety and security need to be considered. Multi-core microcontrollers offer even more hardware potential for integration scenarios. To tackle the complexity, more and more model based approaches are used. Understanding the interaction between the different software components, not only from a functional but also from a timing view, is a key success factor for high integration scenarios. In particular for multi-core systems, an amazing amount of timing data can be generated. Usually a multi-core system handles more software functionality than a single-core system. Furthermore, there may be timing interference on the multicore systems, due to the shared usage of buses, memory banks or other hardware resources.

Automotive powertrain and safety systems under design today are highly complex, incorporating more than one CPU core, running with more than 100 MHz and consisting of several 10 million transistors. Software complexity increases similarly making new methodologies and tools mandatory to manage the overall system. The use of accurate virtual prototypes improves the quality of systems with respect to system architecture design and software development. This approach is demonstrated with the example of the PCP/GPTA subsystem for Infineon's AUDO-NG powertrain controllers.

Software complexity of vehicles is constantly growing especially with additional autonomous driving features being introduced. This increases the risk for bugs in the system, when the car is delivered. According to a car manufacturer, more than 90% of availability problems corresponding to Electronic Control Unit (ECU) functionality are either caused by software bugs or they can be resolved by applying software updates to overcome hardware issues. The main concern are sporadic errors which are not caught during the development phase since their trigger condition is too unlikely to occur or is not covered by the tests. For such systems, there is a need of safe and secure infield diagnosis. In this paper we present a tool software architecture with remote access, which facilitates standard read/write access, an efficient channel interface for communication and file I/O, and continuous trace.