HMI development platforms for integrated automotive digital cockpits

The Qt Company and Green Hills Software have announced a collaboration to deliver the latest in Human Machine Interface (HMI) development platforms for integrated automotive digital cockpits, focused on production deployment. Qt and Green Hills showcased the revolutionary HMI platform at CES 2018.

The automotive digital cockpit encompasses the majority of the HMI systems in today’s connected vehicles consisting of disparate systems of different safety levels. Furthermore, due to safety requirements, instrument clusters use operating systems built to higher standards of safety and security than those used in general in-vehicle infotainment systems. These different safety level requirements combined with the use of different operating systems makes it difficult for developers to create a unified cockpit experience.

To tackle this challenge, Qt has integrated its cross-platform Qt Automotive Suite framework with Green Hills safe and secure INTEGRITY Multivisor virtualization offering to enable the integration of disparate HMI interfaces across multiple operating systems at different safety levels into a single multicore system while complying with the highest levels of automotive safety standards.

Green Hills INTEGRITY Real-Time Operating system (RTOS) is the gold standard run-time foundation for safety/security-critical software in industrial, avionics, medical, automotive and railway. As an optional RTOS service, the INTEGRITY Multivisor secure virtualization extension safely runs high level operating systems such as Linux and Android alongside real-time critical applications requiring safety and security, assuring freedom from interference with native speed performance and safe, secure inter-process communication.

The Green Hills INTEGRITY RTOS, when combined with the Qt Safe Renderer, enables ISO 26262 certification for important safety-critical display elements. Additionally, the Qt Safe Renderer, as part of the Qt Automotive Suite, enables designers and software engineers to use a single User Interface (UI) toolkit to design, build and test digital cockpits across all HMI needs, independent of safety requirements, for a consistent user experience. Qt is the leading framework to enable developers to build both instrument clusters and center stacks with a single toolkit. Advances in processing power, together with mature safe, secure hypervisor technology result in significant cost savings without compromising safety when integrated into a single system on a single multicore automotive SoC using this combination.

“Green Hills has deployed millions of ASIL certified digital clusters in the automotive industry based on its safe and secure ASIL certified INTEGRITY RTOS,” said Dan Mender, Vice President, Business Development, at Green Hills Software. “The Multivisor secure virtualization service for INTEGRITY is the proven foundation required for production-ready mixed-criticality consolidation in next-generation software-defined automotive cockpits. Our collaboration with Qt addresses the HMI tools needed to build digital cockpits that not only comply with safety standards, but also seamlessly meet and exceed driver expectations while on the road.”

“Our collaboration with Green Hills Software addresses the challenges that come with the growing number of connected screens, ECUs and devices built into our vehicles today,” said Juhapekka Niemi, Executive Vice President, Sales and Business Development, The Qt Company. “By allowing developers to build and test their applications in a desktop environment before deploying to INTEGRITY-enabled embedded devices, Qt enables rapid development of consolidated digital cockpit HMI systems of different safety levels integrated into a single system, resulting in shorter development cycles and reduced cost without compromising safety.”