VxWorks for Automotive Solution Brief


The automotive industry is evolving at a rapid pace as vehicles become more connected and autonomous, requiring higher levels of computing power to run a growing number of software applications. Electronic systems are also growing more complex as a result of the need to maintain freedom from interference among system functions without sacrificing system performance, integrity, and scalability. Car manufacturers and suppliers face a difficult challenge in ensuring that system integrity is maintained, but they must also be mindful of the impact of their design choices on the cost of the vehicle system. With the rising focus on electrification in the vehicle, this balance becomes more complicated, as system weight and power consumption will have an increasingly critical impact on the vehicle’s ability to deliver value to end consumers.

With safety as the foundation, modern and forward-looking software architectures can help the industry address these challenges, leading to increasing levels of value for drivers.

What is safety in autonomous vehicle software? The answer to this question is evolving in the industry in real time. As we enter the era of artificial intelligence in the car, the state of the art in conventional safety (e.g., fixedfunction systems that can be independently certified to meet the standard of functional safety best practices) is being redefined by learning systems that can be validated against a nominal standard of performance to ensure that data inputs are properly converted into vehicle outputs in predictable and deterministic ways.

With technology in more than 100 million automobiles, Wind River® brings together software, technologies, tools, and services to help carmakers intelligently unify, simplify, and maintain software systems. Wind River continues to invest heavily in its VxWorks® real-time operating system (RTOS) to add new features and maintain its very high level of security, safety, and reliability. VxWorks delivers hard real-time performance, determinism, and low latency along with the scalability required for vehicle applications. It is the world’s most widely used commercial RTOS with more than 30 years in the field and more than 2 billion deployments.

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