Feature: Automotive


Software- defined vehicles demand a new level of runtime


visibility By Dr Johan Kraft, CTO, Percepio


updates. Features that previously existed within the boundaries of individual ECUs now interact across domains, delivering architectures that are more capable, but also significantly more complex to reason about. System behaviour is now increasingly shaped by interactions between concurrently executing components, communication pathways and timing relationships that are difficult to fully understand through static analysis or conventional testing alone.


A


The limits of conventional validation Automotive development has long relied on a rigorous combination of unit testing, integration testing, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop validation. Tese techniques remain fundamental to delivering reliable soſtware and are more important than ever in safety-critical environments – not least


s the transition towards soſtware-defined vehicles (SDVs) accelerates, manufacturers are consolidating functions onto increasingly powerful compute platforms. Systems that were once isolated are now integrated, and soſtware lifecycles are extended through over-the-air


Figure 1: Time-synchronised views correlate scheduling, timing, CPU load and kernel activity, helping engineers trace causal relationships across the system


30 October 2026 www.electronicsworld.co.uk


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44