The Use of Java in the Context of AUTOSAR 4.0 Expectations and Possibilities

Modern cars contain a large number of diverse microcon-trollers for a wide range of tasks, which imposes high efforts in the integration process of hardware and software. There is a paradigm shift from a federated architecture to an inte-grated architecture with commonly used resources to reduce complexity, costs, weight and energy. AUTOSAR [3] is a system platform that allows the inte-gration of software components (SW-C) and basic software modules provided by different manufacturers. The system platform can be tailored in a wide range to efficiently use the resources of the individual electronic control unit. Software modules- mostly written in C or even Assembler- are rarely isolated from each other and have global access to the memory, wherefore an error can easily spread among different software modules. Memory protection mechanisms therefore gain more importance on the AUTOSAR platform. Hardware-based memory protection- an optional feature in AUTOSAR systems – requires a memory protection unit (MPU), which is not present on low-end microcontrollers. By using type safe languages such as Java, software-based memory protection can be applied on these devices. The performance, footprint and resource consumption of a module written in Java are comparable to the C implementation, if novel and adapted tools for the application area are used. This paper presents the KESO compiler tool for efficiently developing Java applications using software-based spatial isolation. Moreover, we show that a seemless integration with legacy C applications on an AUTOSAR system is feasible by means of the KESO component API generator1. 1