Software-Defined Vehicles: The Automotive Revolution with Silicon at its Heart

Robert Day, Director, Autonomous Vehicles, Arm

Based in San Jose, Calif., Robert Day is the director of autonomous vehicles at Arm, responsible for the definition of Arm-based solutions for the next generation of autonomous vehicle applications. In this role, Robert is dedicated to understanding the requirements for future autonomous innovation and helping put together solutions and platforms to meet those requirements. By immersing himself in the autonomous-vehicle world, he has accumulated a wealth of knowledge around the technology, issues and potential solutions that will make self-driving vehicles a reality. Prior to Arm, Robert was VP of Marketing at Lynx Software Technologies, where he was responsible for the Lynx portfolio of safety and security solutions, focusing on avionics and automotive applications. Robert started his career as a SCADA engineer, and later wrote processor simulators for the popular XRAY debugger with Mentor Graphics.

Robert has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Brighton, UK.

How has last 18 months been for the industry and for your company?

The shortage of chips has brought attention to the need for alternatives for software defined vehicles. To solve this issue the only option that was left behind is to source piece of silicon that will function exactly like a chip and allow software to run. We at Arm are creating this wonderful automotive IP that our silicon partners will turn into chips and then sell to the automotive OEMs or tier one vehicle manufacturers. This is encouraging the manufacturers and ensuring them that their software is future-proof and portable to any location they choose.

“We at Arm are enabling people to implement the software and the hardware that goes with trends”

What are some of the new initiatives taken by Arm?

Even before there was a global issues with chip shortage the automotive manufacturers were always already looking at a sort of trend called the software defined vehicle. This means that a lot of the features in our automobile will actually be determined by the software and we can update the entire system similarly to how a mobile phone's software can be updated. 

However, the issue is that in general when it comes to updating car systems, many of the systems in our car are essentially static throughout the lifetime of the vehicle. We at Arm have been collaborating with other automotive and software industry leaders to design an architecture that the automotive software teams could utilize to develop and deploy software more quickly. Looking at what industries out there are doing in terms of cloud we have used the same methodology for software development in cars.

How do you really see the future of your company in next 18 to 24 months?

There are a number of trends in the market today which impact both hardware and software.

For instance autonomy and electrification. People are re-imagining their cars' interior aesthetics and user experience as society shifts to electrification. In the same way when it comes to the software defined vehicle which is one of the popular trend now, we now examine the transition from present driver assistance to driver autonomy. We at Arm are enabling people to implement the software and the hardware that goes with these trends. So for example, we are making high performance compute for automotive vehicles which includes bringing safety, because that's key for a car.