Virtual Open Systems Newsletter

Software products and services for automotive, industrial, edge systems

Research: H2020 EVEREST - Virtualized distributed computing

Since October 2020, Virtual Open Systems is an active contributor of the dEsign enVironmEnt foR Extreme-Scale big data analytics on heterogeneous platforms (EVEREST) H2020 project. The company leads the development efforts for the project runtime, that include hardware accelerators and edge systems virtualization. In this context, the latest RISC-V developments results have been published with the scientific paper "VOSySmonitoRV: a mixed-criticality solution on Linux-capable RISC-V platforms", presented at the IEEE MECO21 conference. In addition, the project runtime and virtualization activities have been presented during the "climbing EVEREST: dEsign enVironmEnt foR Extreme-Scale big data analyTics on heterogeneous platforms" session at the 2nd Workshop on DevOps support for Cloud FPGA platforms (cFDevOps21) organized in the context of the International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL21).

Product development: VOSySmonitoRV core-sharing demonstration

The latest developments of the VOSySmonitoRV product are presented in the RISC-V core sharing video demonstration published on the company website. In the video, VOSySmonitoRV runs on a HiFive Unleashed platform equipped with four CPU cores, with one of those CPU cores used concurrently by both FreeRTOS and Linux. In fact, thanks to the new RISC-V core sharing feature, VOSySmonitoRV delivers a more efficient use of the system resources, boosting the Linux performance when the RTOS is idle. The RTOS stability and performance is not impacted by the new core sharing feature, with RTOS applications surviving to linux crashes and with a measured RTOS boot time of ~10ms.

Innovation: H2020 ENOCH - Automotive virtualization

Virtual Open Systems, in partnership with ENERGICA Motor Company, continues the activities to develop a virtualized motorcycle electronic control unit (ECU) based on VOSySmonitor. This work is done in the context of the H2020 DIGIFED ENergica cOnneCtivity Hub (ENOCH) project, where VOSySmonitor is ported on the Armv8 based BCM2711 System on Chip (SoC) and as well on the Armv7 based STM32MP1 SoC. The objective of this work is to provide electronic Tier-1 automotive customers with a low power/low cost development environment for mixed-criticality applications.

H2020 Horizon: Partnering new call proposals

The company is committed to innovation in several market segment including automotive, high performance computing, edge systems, industrial and in general related to security and mixed criticality, and as such is ready to respond to the European commission research and development new program Horizon Europe, with its vision of creating heterogeneous high performance embedded systems with first-class security and mixed criticality support. In fact, we are now working at two high quality proposals targeting Cluster 4 (Twin transition, Resilience, Data, Digital Emerging, Space, etc), calls that ambition to set the ground for future generation of hardware accelerated Artificial Intelligence driven edge and mixed criticality systems.

VOSySmonitor: New customers opportunity

Virtual Open Systems high quality design and development services are appreciated by customers from all over the world. We are engaged in a continuous discussion with our customers to understand their requirements and to accelerate innovation from real market needs. Today, opportunities under discussion are related to the port of VOSySmonitor to two new hardware platforms in industrial and automotive markets. The former is the NXP S32G, a quad Arm Cortex-A53/triple Arm Cortex-M7 with ISO 26262 ASIL D certification targeting the automotive market. The latter is the TI AM64x, empowered with a dual Cortex-A53/dual Cortex R5F/single Cortex M4F and targeting the energy market. In both cases VOSySmonitor will be used to enable concurrent execution of both a Real Time operating system (RTOS) and Linux.

Software development services: Delivered since more than a decade

Targeting the lowest close-to-the-hardware layers of the software development in complex heterogeneous systems, Virtual Open Systems has continuously delivered, since more than a decade, specialized design and development services to a worldwide customer basis. New customers regularly decide to benefit from the know how and experience of the company in mixed critical, virtualization, embedded software along with most of the existing multicore hardware platforms to boost and enlarge their system offer in many market, including automotive, IoT, IIoT, industrial, energy, etc.

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