OREANDA-NEWS. Subaru XV Hybrid 2013 Bangalore: Tata Elxsi announced that its Automotive Electronics Development Division has completed the development of an AUTOSAR 3.0 compliant gateway electronic control unit (ECU) for Subaru, the automobile manufacturing division of Fuji Heavy Industries. This ECU has now gone into the production of Subaru’s new hybrid electric vehicle from June 2013.

Fuji Heavy Industries awarded this complex electronic product development contract to Tata Elxsi based on its track record and work experience for AUTOSAR-compliant electronics development.

The scope of work involved development of an ECU on a dual-core microcontroller, which helps control the inter-bus communication necessary to pass information between multiple communication networks within the vehicle. This included complete hardware and software development, hardware-software integration and system-level testing. This gateway ECU has multiple controller area network and local interconnect network channels and one of the application cores runs Tata Elxsi developed AUTOSAR 3.0 BSW. Tata Elxsi’s safety engineers have also ensured that the gateway ECU is ISO26262 ASIL-C compliant.

Tata Elxsi’s strong experience in AUTOSAR-based ECU development coupled with offshore engineering and hardware prototyping to international standards, has enabled Fuji Heavy Industries to achieve over 30 percent reduction in overall development costs. Tata Elxsi provided the OEM the much-needed flexibility to add / modify the requirements during the program and also designed the hardware which was provided to the EMS vendor for mass production. In an on-going relationship, Tata Elxsi continues to support Subaru with software maintenance of the ECU and development of multiple variants of the gateway ECU.

Masaru Kurihara, Fuji Heavy Industries, said, “This ECU is not a simple gateway. One core is almost AUTOSAR indeed, but another core is filled with our sophisticated model-based software which manages the whole hybrid power-train. Without Tata Elxsi’s technology and excellent cooperation, this ‘brain’ unit could not have been realised.”

Speaking on the development, Anil Sondur, vice president, Tata Elxsi, commented, “We are happy that we have been able to support Fuji Heavy Industries, who is our esteemed customer in a successful production programme. For Tata Elxsi, this is a moment of great pride to see our end-to-end technical and engineering capability being utilised and deployed in the market by a reputed car company like Subaru. We look forward to a greater relationship in the coming years with Fuji Heavy Industries.”