Excelfore and Siemens Showcase Game-Changing OTA Updates for AUTOSAR
Connected car tech company Excelfore is teaming up with Siemens subsidiary Mentor to show off their eSync over-the-air (OTA) technology, integrated with Mentor’s Capital VStar software. This setup is tailored for updating Autosar firmware in vehicle ECUs (Electronic Control Units).
They’ve built a demo platform combining Excelfore’s eSync software toolkit and Capital VStar, which showcases how Autosar-based devices can be updated over the air. The eSync system securely transmits updates from the cloud to various devices in the vehicle through a unique data pipeline.
Henrik Olsen, Mentor’s director of embedded software, explained that this collaboration aims to provide a full OTA pipeline for Autosar environments, ensuring updates reach all the way to edge devices in a vehicle. Previously, secure links often ended at the car level, but now, this setup enhances security directly to each edge device, including specific authentication and encryption for each gadget.
The demo also highlights how tasks like flashing updates and rolling back to previous versions can be handled by edge devices throughout the car, rather than relying solely on centralized systems. Shrikant Acharya, CTO at Excelfore, stated that this integration significantly simplifies things for car manufacturers and tier-one suppliers, cuts down on vehicle downtime, and boosts overall security.
ESync itself uses a distributed system with a cloud server and in-car software agents, known as eSync Agents, running on the ECUs. These agents work seamlessly with Capital VStar’s complex drivers and cryptographic functions, which lets the ECUs handle more OTA tasks independently, thus reducing the load on central car resources and allowing multiple device updates at once.
The eSync system, promoted by the eSync Alliance, not only updates software and firmware over the air but also gathers real-time data from various in-car devices like ECUs, gateway networks, and smart sensors. This helps car makers avoid expensive recalls and makes it easy to update vehicle software and features on the go.
In addition to the eSync integration, Excelfore recently announced that they are licensing their Ethernet protocol stacks for use with the Capital VStar software, further enhancing their collaborative efforts.
