Samsung and Wind River team up over the ‘software-defined vehicle’

The supposed utopia of cars receiving constant over-the-air software updates is the reason for a new collaboration between Samsung’s chip business and embedded software specialist Wind River.

There’s a version of the Samsung Exynos system-on-chip that is designed especially for automotive use, called the Auto V920. The cunning plan seems to be to preinstall a bunch of handy Wind River software on these chips, to create the proverbial end-to-end solution. Specifically, it will use Wind River Helix multi-OS virtualization platform, which will presumably help this solution to play nice with as many cars and platforms as possible.

“A new software-defined approach is required for designing and developing the high-performance compute systems needed for connected, autonomous, and electric vehicles,” said Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer at Wind River. “Our collaboration with Samsung enables OEMs and Tier 1’s to leverage our four decades of experience in developing safety-critical applications for aerospace and defense, industrial, medical, and telecommunications customers toward building the certified, mixed-criticality software systems that are essential for the software-defined vehicles of the future.”

“Our latest 5nm automotive processor, Exynos Auto V920, offers powerful and intelligent performance for a new level of in-vehicle experience with safer driving,” said Hyeokman Kwon, VP of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics. “It’s able to run multiple applications on multiple VMs simultaneously in a highly power-efficient manner, satisfying the industry’s low power consumption demand. Our close collaboration with Wind River allows us to enhance our industry-leading IVI development work and further expand into multiple safety-critical domains with Wind River leading runtime environments, including VxWorks and Helix Platform.”

They didn’t have much else to say about this joint venture, so it’s difficult to assess its broader significance. But Samsung is also one of the world’s major technology companies as well as its biggest Android smartphone vendor, and Wind River is an embedded software leader. So, if everything goes according to plan, their combined contribution to the software-defined car should be significant. Whether that’s something we should aspire to, however, remains up for debate.

Get the latest news straight to your inbox. Register for the Telecoms.com newsletter here.