China's automotive basic software has ushered in a golden window of development.
At present, the automotive electronic and electrical architecture is accelerating to the era of "cross-domain integration", and the automotive software architecture is also accelerating to upgrade to the SOA architecture. The layered decoupling of software and hardware has become a prerequisite for realizing the new development model of "software-defined cars".
In the past, all functions of automobiles were developed through integrated development of software and hardware. The software and hardware lacked a unified interface. When the same function was adapted to different models, it often needed to be redesigned and redeveloped. Not only was the workload cumbersome and complicated, but also Cannot be opened to third parties.
However, in the era of software-defined cars, more and more car companies are adopting the profit model of "hardware embedded + software paid to unlock". In order to achieve differentiation, OEMs often need to collect the changing needs of users with very fast response capabilities, and perform corresponding software iterations. Against this background, car companies have increasingly strong demands for software reuse, rapid deployment and update of software solutions, and reduction of software development costs.
Vehicle-based basic software is the key link to realize the decoupling of software and hardware. It can provide reusable and stable software support for subsequent automotive system services. Its architecture and performance directly affect the development efficiency and quality of upper-layer applications.
Industry insiders agree that the next few years will be a critical period for the entire automotive industry to transform and upgrade to software-defined, and it will also be an important window for the development of China's vehicle-based basic software. Whoever can seize this wave of opportunities will be able to lock in the huge software bonus of the intelligent transformation of China's auto market in advance.
Melee
In the past few years, a large number of traditional car companies, Tier1, and technology companies have seen the value of basic software, and have increased their focus on the basic software track of the car.
For example, traditional Tier 1 such as Bosch, Continental, ZF, and Aptiv have been strengthening the layout of the basic software track in the past few years; A batch of local manufacturers are also speeding up their layout.
"At this stage, major car companies are constantly expanding their software development teams, and the contradictions between software development costs, software development speed, and software quality are becoming more and more acute." Some people in the industry said that in the new automotive electronic and electrical architecture Now, the software development of different domains of the whole vehicle begins to integrate, the code volume of the software increases exponentially, and the complexity is far more complicated than imagined.
And Zhao Jianhong, vice president of products of Yingchi Technology, also said that under the background of multi-domain integration, the basic software of the car will form a pan-operating system, and the upward direction will be the operating system of the whole vehicle, which has the characteristics of multi-chip and multi-service. Compared with AUTOSAR, the software stack is more complicated, and the communication method, security foundation, tool chain, etc. must be fully upgraded.
Therefore, under the trend of multi-domain integration, how to improve the efficiency of collaborative development under the vehicle architecture and reduce the cost of software development has become an important topic of concern to the industry. This also provides an excellent market window for third-party basic software suppliers.
In this regard, Ke Zhuliang, founder and CEO of Lingnian Technology, said: " Currently, China's automotive basic software is still highly dependent on foreign software suppliers, but the progress of AUTOSAR AP architecture ecological construction is not yet obvious. At the same time, the process of China's automotive intelligence Already leading, this will be the best window for the development of China's vehicle-mounted basic software. "
In a broad sense, the underlying hardware BSP, RTOS, OS, AutoSAR, and middleware all belong to the basic software track. Yingchi Technology is one of the few manufacturers in the world that can provide cross-domain (multi-domain integration) high-performance computing software platforms. Its self-developed EMOS is a high-performance computing software platform for complete vehicles, including vehicle OS middleware , autonomous driving software platform, etc. At present, intelligent driving software and intelligent domain control solutions (including communication protocol stacks) equipped with EMOS have been mass-produced in SAIC, Great Wall, Ideal and other auto companies.
Founded in 2021, Lengnian Technology mainly provides a complete SOA architecture CarOS including high-performance communication middleware, task scheduling management, functional safety services, and mass production services. At the same time, the development tool chain developed by Lingnian Technology can help customers generate customized platform software with zero manual code.
Overall, basic software has become a must for Chinese and foreign suppliers. Among them, some suppliers can provide full-stack solutions, and some provide professional modular solutions.
How to get away?
It is undeniable that although China's in-vehicle basic software is in the window period of "a hundred flowers blooming", it is also facing many difficulties and challenges. For example, the basic software of the vehicle has not yet formed a unified technical specification and standard, and the business model has not yet been opened up.
" At present, China's automotive basic software market has shown a 'chimney effect'. Excessive differentiation has led to a lot of repeated development and wasted unnecessary social resources. Finding the balance between self-development and cooperation and avoiding repeated wheel creation is the key to the current automobile industry. It is an important issue that the industry urgently needs to think about .” Ke Zhuliang said.
In addition, he said that in the traditional automobile industry, everyone is only willing to pay for hardware or a system that integrates software and hardware, but the value of pure software is not well understood, and the business model of software licensing is still in its infancy.
Xue Yunzhi, president of Guoke Foundation Stone , also said that at different stages of the EE architecture, the industry's requirements for the underlying basic software are quite different. Under the general trend of multi-domain integration, automotive software needs to build an open source and open ecological paradigm. "Through open source and open, borderless collaboration, etc., we can gather the wisdom and strength of all, quickly promote the development iteration of basic software, and promote the wide application of technology and products."
Against this background, in recent years, industrial chain companies have launched a round of cooperation boom, and foreign software manufacturers including Elektrobit have also accelerated the construction of their cooperation ecosystem in the Chinese market.
Obviously, with the vertical and horizontal cooperation of all parties in the industry chain, the supply relationship between suppliers and car companies is also changing. The traditional car supply chain has been broken, and the original chain-like "supply" model has begun to shift to a flat "cooperation" model. "model. In the future, it will become a trend for car companies to designate operating systems and middleware modules, and companies with flexible business models are expected to become super winners.
" In three years, the basic software market will undergo a fierce reshuffle, and eventually there will be a few oligopolistic companies. " Zhao Jianhong said bluntly, the companies that have invested in mass production projects in the early stage and have a large scale will be the first to come out.
So, at this stage, how should Chinese local basic software companies establish their own competition barriers? Xue Yunzhi said that the primary goal of basic software companies is to solve the generation gap between productivity and complexity, and help OEMs put products on the market faster, thereby establishing strong competition barriers.
Secondly, basic software service providers can extensively adapt to upstream and downstream software and hardware products in the industry chain. Open vertically.
On the other hand, it is to build an in-depth cooperative relationship with OEMs, and provide customized software services based on mature product solutions and differentiated needs of OEMs, thereby helping OEMs build a differentiated competitive landscape.
Guoke Foundation Stone aims at the key strategy of operating system open source. It has successively released the overall planning of the photon operating system and the open source plan, and the photon real-time operating system (Photon RTOS). In the future, it will create an automotive operating system for the next generation of smart cars. The overall solution and the mixed key kernel operating system that supports multi-core heterogeneous environment are open source.
It is true that the next few years will be a critical period for the development of China's local basic software companies. How to break through the basic software technology challenges and problems of multi-domain integration, and quickly establish a strong barrier to competition is extremely important for companies entering the basic software track.
On August 30-31, the 2023 (fifteenth) Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Developers Conference (Automotive Software, Cockpit Vehicle Association) and the annual award ceremony for the competitiveness of suppliers/product solutions in subdivided fields will be held in Hongqiao, Shanghai Held at the Macrolink Sofitel Hotel, companies in the industrial chain including ETAS, Guoke Foundation Stone, BlackBerry, ZTE, Changxing Zhijia, etc. will discuss issues such as new trends in the smart car software market and business model innovation.
At the same time, the conference also set up special sessions on themes such as network security, cockpit car networking, multi-modal human-computer interaction, 5G and V2X. Representatives of Neusoft, Harman, Autotech and other companies will attend and deliver wonderful speeches.
In addition, Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Research Institute will also release the "2023-2030 China Automobile Intelligent Software Market Trend Report", and announce the final award-winning company list of "Top 10 Suppliers of Intelligent Vehicle Software Segmentation Track in 2023" on the spot.