Unlock Flexibility and Innovation for Cockpit Systems with Hardware-Software Synergy

Embracing a Decoupled Approach to Cockpit System Development

The automotive industry is witnessing a transformative shift, driven by the convergence of technological advancements, changing consumer behaviors, and evolving market demands. Cockpit systems are becoming increasingly complex and are rapidly evolving to provide a more immersive and intuitive driving experience, with a focus on hyper-personalization, seamless displays, and advanced voice and AI integration. Automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are under intense pressure to bring innovative features, while reducing costs, and accelerate time-to-market to stay competitive. This requires a flexible approach to reduce interdependency of hardware and software components development for cockpit systems.

The conventional sourcing model, which has long played a vital role in the industry, is now being reevaluated to address the need for greater flexibility and agility. A decoupled approach to independent software and hardware development has now become essential.

Decoupling hardware and software development enables Software integration partners to focus on software development and innovation, while allowing hardware Tier-1 suppliers to concentrate solely on delivering high-quality hardware components. This enables flexibility for OEMs to stay ahead of the curve.

What's Holding the Automotive Industry Back: Identifying Key Challenges

The automotive industry currently faces significant hurdles in its pursuit of innovation and speed to market. Some of the key challenges include:

• Feature Delays and High Costs: Most OEMs are still following the conventional sourcing model, leading to dependencies on Tier-1s and a limited number of SoC players resulting in support bottlenecks, delayed features, and increased costs.
• Sluggish Execution Speed: With less software ownership in the conventional sourcing model setup, OEMs are facing slower execution speed to bring enhanced features in cockpit systems due to less re-usability and changing ecosystem across programs.
• Readiness and Time-to-Market Constraints: A significant proportion of OEM bandwidth is spent on programs in production or going into production, while only a small percentage is dedicated to future programs, hindering competitiveness and time-to-market capabilities.

5 Pillars to Unlock Hardware-Software Synergy

Achieving successful hardware-software separated roadmaps in the automotive industry requires a multi-faceted approach:

• Ecosystem Enablement: Cockpit systems have newer technology additions every 2 – 3 years and hence the ability to handle and integrate newer software is required.
• Software Platform Management: Managing 3+ software platforms (Linux, QNX, Android) and performing continuous updates, upgrades and maintenance of the IVI software is required for a longer period post delivery of vehicle to customers.
• SoC/BSP Firmware Management: Collaborating closely with SoC vendors to ensure timely BSP level updates across various domains, ensuring seamless hardware-software integration.
• Integration and Infrastructure: Establishing a robust integration and infrastructure framework, to manage a large number of repositories, pipelines, and software output [branches], to facilitate efficient development and testing.
• System Validation: Comprehensive system validation of multiple displays, HMI screens, 32 languages, 3+ user interfaces, and 3+ devices to ensure flawless user experience and functionality.

A dedicated software integration partner with experience and expertise in handling above challenges can help OEMs bridge the gap between hardware and software development by providing a roadmap and being a part of the OEM journey from their current setup towards a decoupled development of hardware and software. This will result in accelerated time-to-market, reduced costs, and more innovation for OEMs. Hardware Tier 1 suppliers can therefore focus on their core competencies of hardware development.

Why KPIT?

As a leading software integration partner, KPIT offers a unique combination of expertise and experience that can help OEMs achieve their goals at the maturity stage they are on. KPIT’s expertise in software integration and validation, Ecosystem partnerships, advanced hardware design capabilities, and ready-to-use platforms, IPs, and frameworks can help achieve the desired flexibility and innovation in cockpit system development with successful decoupling of hardware and software. Key benefits that OEMs can expect include:

• 30% reduction in software costs using reusable platform IPs and SoC partnerships
• Reduction in Software BOM costs through optimized hardware and software solutions
• 20 months time-to-market from 36 months with reference platform and ready-to-use solutions
• 20-30% improvement in software maintenance costs through tools and automation

By embracing a hardware-software synergy model, OEMs can unlock new opportunities, bring new features faster to vehicle model programs, and efficiently maintain existing vehicle programs with seamless software upgrades. This strategic shift in independent and parallel development of both hardware and software for cockpit systems will also be instrumental in realizing the vision of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs), enabling seamless software updates, over-the-air feature enhancements, and personalized customer experiences.

Author: Venkatraman V, Senior Practice Director, KPIT and Co-author: Siddharth Andani, Associate Marketing Manager, KPIT