As intelligent technologies continue advancing and the automotive industry embraces the trend of “software-defined vehicles,” the quality and testing of automotive chips and software not only affect vehicle safety, but also play key roles in enhancing user experience and product competitiveness. As a global leader in mmWave radar chips, Calterah has been dedicated for years to continuously improving the quality of automotive chips and basic software through efforts in aspects such as management processes, product technologies, platform tools, etc. thus helping to ensure vehicle safety. On September 3rd, Ye Yang, Calterah’s Infrastructure Development Manager, was invited to attend the 2024 Automotive Software Quality and Testing Summit (AutoSQT 2024), where he delivered a keynote speech titled "Integrated Platform to Boost R&D Efficiency" to elaborate on Calterah’s practices and achievements in building an  integrated platform for the R&D of automotive chips and software.

Faced with the high technical threshold of automotive chips and the project management challenges brought by chip and basic software development, which involves multiple work types and product lines, the industry has been grappling with the problem of building a tool platform that is easy to use and manage to improve R&D efficiency. By deep exploration of pain points in the chip R&D process and continuous innovation and optimization, Calterah has managed to craft its own integrated R&D platform for chips and software. This platform essentially covers tools for the entire lifecycle of chip development and provides functions including task aggregation, resource management, code building, testing and verification, version delivery, and efficiency measurement. It not only enhances the R&D efficiency of chips and software, but also offers accurate efficiency measurement, effectively facilitating the high-quality development and delivery of automotive chips and software.

At the summit, Yang shared Calterah’s exploration and experiences in areas such as multi-view task aggregation, hardware resource sharing, customized needs in code gatekeeping, automated testing, etc.

Calterah’s integrated R&D platform for chips and software aggregates tasks from different third-party platforms, enabling centralized management of requirements, code, and bugs. It also provides views from the perspectives of projects, teams, and individuals, greatly improving work efficiency. In chip development, FPGA verification before and after chip tapeout creates a high demand for hardware resources. To cope with this challenge, the integrated platform provides a hardware resource management system, which allows R&D personnel to easily access information of hardware resources, make reservations, view announcements, and conduct data statistics, effectively managing and scheduling hardware resources to alleviate demand pressure. Additionally, the integrated platform will also offer a unique pipeline customization system, addressing the limitations of using Jenkins to build Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines, enhancing convenience and intuitiveness.

When it comes to improving the efficiency and quality of automotive chip software testing, automated testing is critical. Yang noted that Calterah’s firmware of new SoC products has achieved an automation test rate of over 80%, while for firmware of older products, the rate exceeds 95%, which are made possible by Calterah’s self-developed automated testing platform.

Calterah’s Self-Developed Automated Testing Platform

Unlike regular software, automotive chip firmware involves more complex testing scenarios. As a result, Calterah has developed an automated testing platform, implementing features such as test case management based on Codebeamer, distributed compilation and testing, test layering, diverse test triggers and real-time updates, etc. These features significantly improve the utilization of hardware resources, simplify learning curves for staff, streamline management processes, and optimize team collaboration, thereby greatly enhancing overall work efficiency.

Amidst the CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared, and Electric) megatrends, Calterah will continue to pursue high quality and technological breakthroughs in automotive chips and software, helping to protect the safety of intelligent vehicles and contributing to the innovative development of connected vehicles.