According to NXP this combination will help to drastically reduce the development effort and time to market across a broad range of automotive applications.
Traditionally, the approach for software development has been to rely on AUTOSAR for automotive-grade drivers, however, not all applications require it. An alternative route is self-development but this tends to be labour-intensive, adds qualification requirements and is a drain on limited resources and as ECU complexity increases, it is only possible to maintain high-quality software and time-to-market requirements by using mature, validated sub-system components.
In applications where the use of AUTOSAR is not mandated, NXP is looking to provide an alternative, turn-key option for self-development with a free-of-charge, pre-qualified, automotive-grade software development kit (SDK) that enables rapid prototyping with simple drag and drop functionality. It includes: MISRA and SPICE Level 3 compliant low-level drivers (LLDs) for all peripherals; optional application-specific middleware for LIN, NFC and touch sensing; FreeRTOS operating system; drivers for complementary NXP ICs for faster application bring-up and production readiness e.g. system basis chip (SBC) drivers and documented source code and out-of-the-box examples, eliminating the need for device documentation during application bring-up
The SDK is pre-installed in NXP’s S32 Design Studio (DS), an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) supporting multiple compiler and debugger options.
For AUTOSAR applications, NXP standard MCAL and OS support has been expanded with new Complex Device Drivers (CDD) and a new S32K starter kit from ARCCORE significantly lowering cost and complexity barriers to adoption. It is available free of charge for evaluation.
Unlike existing solutions that require multiple MCU platforms to cover a similar range, the initial S32K1 family will span 128KB-2MB of flash memory based on high performance ARM Cortex-M cores.
All family members include ISO CAN FD, CSEc hardware security, ASIL-B support and ultra-low-power performance. This scalable approach, combined with a common package strategy and production grade software, maximizes reuse allowing customers to react quickly to changing market requirements.