Off-Highway Vehicle OEM Hitting GUI Deadlines in a Chip‑Constrained Market
The Customer
A new player to the off-highway electric vehicle market, this company is focused on delivering a best-in-class user experience for their next generation products. With the aim to create a safe, smart and connected experience for their customers, they are committed to offering best-in-class technology and innovation across every component of their vehicle.
The Challenge
With a new multi-functional display (MFD) project to begin, the development team for this company started by evaluating tool platforms for creating the graphical user interface (GUI). Their evaluation includes several popular tools, including tools that team members had used in previous roles.
Due to the ISO 26262 compliance needs for their MFD, the GUI software needed to have features that would accommodate these requirements.
While the team had not yet selected a final hardware platform for their product, they were quickly learning that—given the current chip shortage—lead times for test hardware for their GUI were quite long. Since they would have a tough time acquiring chips for development, the GUI design team was also concerned about project delays. They needed a way to overcome this challenge since they had a product delivery deadline to meet.
The Solution
After a thorough evaluation of similar tools, the GUI design team found that Altia was the best solution for their project. Altia was found to:
- Be the easiest to use
- Provide the best product support
- Have the fastest solution to get up and running on evaluation hardware
- Offer the only fully compliant ISO 26262 safety solution out of the box
The Altia Safety Monitor, the safety solution used for this MFD application, saves the team both money and memory. The overall safety solution including Altia proved to be less expensive than the safe OS and safe rendering solution offered by the hardware manufacturer. Altia’s safety solution requires that less code be ISO 26262 compliant. This safety solution is the only available solution that was compliant out of the box. Additionally, the Altia Safety Monitor is much simpler to implement than other solutions, which would have required a dedicated resource for that part of the project.
Because of the out-of-the-box nature of the Altia Safety Monitor, the design team will save considerable time and development cost for this project.
The Results
This new vehicle GUI design team is well on their way to getting their new product to market on time thanks to Altia CloudWare™.
Altia CloudWare™ is a Hardware as a Service solution that allows GUI developers to pair Altia’s GUI software with popular embedded hardware to test drive different chips from anywhere in the world. The team used CloudWare™ to evaluate and ultimately select the production platform for their project and begin their design right away—overcoming the extended lead time for their evaluation hardware.
“My hardware lead time is almost 30 weeks out. Altia CloudWare™ is making it possible for my team to design and test my GUI now so that my project stays on track,” stated the Senior Project Manager for this Off-Highway Vehicle OEM.
Because the team is distributed in separate locations, Altia CloudWare™ is enabling efficient collaboration with the various members. Altia CloudWare™ has eliminated delays with software versioning, configuration and compiler installation. The team is working in the Cloud on the same board, same assets and same tool stack, so they know their use case is correct and cohesive.
“Altia’s real-world understanding of the challenges of embedded system setup, configuration and validation inspired the development of Altia CloudWare™,” stated Michael Hill, Altia Vice President of Engineering. “We wanted to give our users the ability to rapidly access embedded systems as if they’re sitting on their own desks—without the hassle associated with hardware and software management. We have achieved this with CloudWare™. We’re looking forward to helping our customers become even more successful with this product.”
While this new electric vehicle is still in development, Altia is enabling the GUI design team to meet their product delivery schedule. When their production hardware is available, their GUI will be ready to deploy—and the vehicle will be ready for the road.
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