Siemens recently introduced the PAVE360 pre-silicon autonomous validation environment – a programme established to enable and accelerate the development of innovative autonomous vehicle platforms. PAVE360 provides a comprehensive environment for multi-supplier collaboration across the automotive ecosystem for the development of next-generation automotive chips. PAVE360 also extends digital twin simulation beyond processors to include automotive hardware and software sub-systems, full vehicle models, fusion of sensor data, traffic flows and even the simulation of smart cities through which self-driving cars will ultimately travel.
“PAVE360 represents the first output of an innovation process born from the combination of Mentor and Siemens employees, ideas, and technologies two years ago,“ said Ravi Subramanian, VP and GM of the IC Verification Solutions Division of Mentor, a Siemens business. “PAVE360 from Siemens delivers a comprehensive programme to support the deep, cross-ecosystem collaboration necessary for our customers to develop powerful custom silicon and software solutions to power the autonomous vehicles revolution.“
PAVE360 enables capabilities for full, closed-loop validation of the sensing/decision-making/actuating paradigm at the heart of all automated driving systems. This principle hinges on rigorous pre-silicon validation of deterministic (rules-based) and non-deterministic (AI-based) approaches to safe self-driving in the context of the full digital twin.
Democratising automotive IC design and development: As advances in processing continue to play an increasingly prominent role in automotive evolution, carmakers are turning to custom silicon designs to deliver the “just right” blends of cost, power, performance and advanced features necessary to enable an autonomous future.
With PAVE360, chip design can be democratized, enabling carmakers, chipmakers, tier one suppliers, software houses and other vendors to collaborate on the development and customisation of extraordinarily complex silicon devices for autonomous vehicles. PAVE360 delivers a robust platform for this collaboration, helping to speed chip design and software validation, and enabling the creation of model-specific silicon for the first-generation of self-driving cars.
PAVE360 establishes a design-simulation-emulation solution that scales from individual blocks of a system-on-chip’s (SoC’s) IP, to hardware and software on the SoCs, to vehicle subsystems, and up through deployment of vehicles in smart cities – a true “chip-to-city” approach based on the increasing digitalisation of the automotive industry.
“PAVE360 from Siemens enables everyone in the automotive value chain to develop custom SoCs, optimised for the performance, power, safety, thermal and form factor requirements of driver assisted and fully automated vehicles in a completely virtual environment,” said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research. “PAVE360 is part of a complete, closed-loop simulation solution from Siemens that allows designers to test everything from silicon development to full vehicle validation.”
Already on display in the Centre for Practical Autonomy Lab in Novi, Michigan, PAVE360 is designed to serve as the industry-standard verification and validation program for modeling solutions in the automated driving ecosystem.
