Hugh Bazzi is one of several new team-mates to have joined the team of Capital experts over the last two years. I was fortunate enough to persuade him to co-present with me on stage at the IESF conference in June this year. His recent professional background immediately prior to joining Mentor Graphics has been in systems design for autonomous vehicles.

Let’s start with a quote from a song:

“It’s a thing that’s worth having – Yes I would

Buys you your life sir – If it could

I, I want you Autonomy

It leaves us all wondering – And it should

This awkward something – For the good”

• The Buzzcocks: Autonomy Written by Stephen Diggle • Copyright © BMG Rights Management US, LLC
• listen and enjoy on YouTube, with the almost inevitable short ad to be begin with, I’m afraid.

Not automotive electrical engineers – musicians – the Buzzcocks

Failure is not an option. Not on your life. Or anyone else’s.

I had heard from others before talking with Hugh about his presentation that automotive was moving towards the disciplines familiar to aerospace systems engineers. He agreed. Exemplars are cited like braking and steering systems which are offered in luxury cars as advanced driver assist. It’s a thing worth having, desired by consumers. Can save your life.

Hugh was careful to make the distinction in his presentation that greater autonomy does not mean an autonomous vehicle – just like an airplane with auto-pilot does not make the airplane a pilotless drone. Redundancy of systems becomes an aspiration engineers work towards. If something fails you still want the function “up” – so signals carrying data can be implemented on parallel but separate networks, signals can be carried on wires routed on two pathways. These are emphatic concerns in the world of autonomous vehicles.

An autonomous car smart enough to ask to be featured on this blog post

Want the big say? Go for the big play.

Mentor Graphics is addressing with software tools some significant discontinuities in automotive electrical systems design – some incorporate integrative techniques/technologies and strategies. Consolidation and centralizing workflows often brings significant simplification of processes, and the potential for improved quality.

In the autonomous vehicle segment, Hugh gave me a quick lesson in challenges of a similar nature. Why would high end chip makers be interested in the automotive market? Because if car geo-position and map information, sensor data processing, image processing, and decision support can include decision making on the same cluster or one piece of silicon (or two for redundancy) instead of distributed on a network of ten pieces of silicon connected together – in the world there are some high end chip makers qualified to make such processing components. These very famous, household name companies are Mentor Graphics’ customers. It is an interesting time to be an automotive engineer.

Authoritative, interesting presentation June 2016 at North American IESF by Mr. Hugh Bazzi.

What’s wanted by autonomous vehicle customers: Hugh identified 5 major areas of concern

Just as I found from a different direction – looking at what value Mentor’s Capital customers told us they were getting from the tool suite, Hugh cited mass and cost first and second as preoccupations. Hugh used “mass” as his category because AV/EV car makers are worried not just about weight also of course the space taken up for packaging (third concern) by the electrical distribution system. The impact on the price of the vehicle is very important, especially if you are trying to make a mass market car so having a way of understanding the price consequence for design decisions is useful. Fourth, the way you can increase vehicle functionality without exploding your mass and cost. Being able to change to incorporate new electronic features, new electrical actuations for mechanical equipment, add sensors comfortably to the architecture is something some ways of working and tools cannot handle. Fifth and finally Hugh described how the quality-reliability engineering deliverable never goes away – the demands get ever more stringent with safety and legal requirements.

Areas electrical engineers are concerned about when designing Autonomous Vehicles.

That Awkward Something

Capital software delivering on promises to address these concerns means users will be refining existing engineering processes to get more efficient, project by project. It is a considerable challenge, because the ways of working may comfortably take you from architectures to mass production in 36-48 months, The challenge for makers of autonomous vehicles is to have 6-12 months development timescales so that their platforms run project schedules with the longest lead time being the time it takes to redesign the processing and processors – not the time taken to design the electrical distribution systems.

EDS design inputs to manufacturing outputs in 6 months is a “ludicrous mode” acceleration which these new, innovative companies are ambitious enough to take on. Hugh said the goal in the autonomous vehicle sector is “more time to focus on innovation while improving the quality and reducing the compliance cost and risk”

That’s a thing that’s worth having.

Thank you very much the Buzzcocks for “Autonomy”