The ELISA Project Strengthens its Focus on Automotive Use Cases with Expertise from New Members Automotive Intelligence and Control of China, LOTUS Cars and ZTE

Register for the ELISA Spring Workshop on April 5-7 to Learn More

SAN FRANCISCO – March 23, 2022 –  Today, the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project, an open source initiative that aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems, announced a stronger ecosystem focused on automotive use cases with the addition of the Automotive Intelligence and Control of China (AICC), LOTUS Cars and ZTE.

“The ELISA ecosystem continues to grow globally with strong support from automakers across Asia and Europe,” Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation. “By leveraging the expertise of current and new ELISA Project members, we are defining the best practices for use of Linux in the automobiles of the future. “

Linux is used in all major industries because it can enable faster time to market for new features and take advantage of the quality of the code development processes. Launched in February 2019 by the Linux Foundation, ELISA works with Linux kernel and safety communities to agree on what should be considered when Linux is to  be used in safety-critical systems. The project has several dedicated working groups that focus on providing resources for System integrators to apply and use to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively on their systems.

The Automotive Working Group discusses the conditions and prerequisites the automotive sector needs to integrate Linux into a safety critical system. The group, which includes collaboration from ADIT, Arm, Codethink, Evidence (a part of Huawei), Red Hat and Toyota, focuses on actual use cases from the Automotive domain to derive the technical requirements to the kernel as a basis for investigation within the Architecture Workgroup and to serve as a blueprint for actual projects in the future. There is also close collaboration with Automotive Grade Linux, which results in a meta-ELISA layer enhancing the instrument cluster demo for safety relevant parts. As leaders in the automotive industry, AICC, LOTUS Cars and ZTE will most likely join the Automotive Working Group.

New Global Automotive Expertise

As the industry’s leading ICV computing infrastructure company, AICC is committed to providing OEMs with intelligent vehicle computing platforms and digital bases for empowering them the differentiated application development ability. In November 2021, AICC released iVBB2.0 series products, which takes ICVOS as the core product, then develops ICVHW, ICVSEC, ICVEC, and other product units. Currently, iVBB2.0 has been delivered to many OEMs and achieved collaboration on cross-platform development, co-built SDV, multi-chip distributed deployment, data security policy deployment and car cloud collaborative computing.

“Becoming a member of the ELISA Project, is in line with the high real-time, high-security, and high-reliability commitment that AICC has always made,” said Dr. Jin Shang, CEO & CTO of AICC. “This will provide a guarantee for the mass production development of AICC’s ICV computing infrastructure platform from security and quality perspectives. Based on the elements, tools, and processes shared by ELISA, AICC will build safety-critical applications and systems relating to Linux requirements, leading to widely used and internationally influential products.”

LOTUS Cars, which was honored as “Manufacturer of the Year” at the News UK Motor Awards in 2021, is focused on the safety of intelligent driving. It is a world-famous manufacturer of sports cars and racing cars noted for their light weight and fine handling characteristics.

“Functional safety is critical to intelligent driving,” said Jie Deng, LOTUS Cars In-Vehicle Operating System Lead. “LOTUS focuses on ‘track-level intelligent drive‘ and is committed to ensuring that drivers stay away from risks through active redundancy of software and hardware. We are very excited to join the ELISA Project and work with industry experts to productize Linux-based safety-critical systems for more drivers to experience intelligent driving in a highly safe and fun way.”

ZTE Corporation is a global leader in telecommunications and information technology.  Founded in 1985, the company has been committed to providing innovative technologies and integrated solutions for operators, government and consumers from over 160 countries. ZTE has established 11 state-of-the-art global R&D centers and 5 intelligent manufacturing bases.

Relying on key technologies and core capabilities in the communications field, ZTE Automotive Electronics is committed to becoming a digital vehicle infrastructure capability provider and an independent high-performance partner in China, facilitating the intelligent and networked development in the automobile field. ZTE has been dedicated to GoldenOS R&D for more than 20 years. On this basis, ZTE proposes the integrated automotive operating system solution of high-performance embedded Linux and high security microkernel OS/Hypervisor, covering all scenarios of intelligent vehicle control, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and intelligent network connectivities.

These new members join ADIT, AISIN AW CO., Arm, Automotive Grade Linux, Banma, BMW Car IT GmbH, Codethink, Elektrobit, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, Intel, Toyota, Kuka, Linuxtronix. Mentor, NVIDIA, SUSE, Suzuki, Wind River, OTH Regensburg and Toyota.

The Spring Workshop

ELISA Project members will come together for its quarterly Spring Workshop on April 5-7 to learn about the latest developments, working group updates, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry. Hosted online, this workshop is free and open to the public. Details and registration information can be found here.

Workshop highlights include:

• A keynote by Robert Martin, Senior Principal Engineer at MITRE Corporation, about “Software Supply Chain Integrity Transparency & Trustworthiness and Related Community Efforts.” The presentation will discuss the capabilities emerging across industry and government to assess and address the challenges to providing trustworthy software supplies with assurance of integrity and transparency to their composition, source, and veracity – the building blocks of software supply chains we can gain justifiable confidence in at scale and speed.
• A session by Christopher Temple, Lead Safety & Reliability Systems Architect at Arm Germany GmbH, and Paul Albertella, Consultant at Codethink, about “Mixed-Criticality Processing on Linux.” This talk will help create a common understanding of mixed-criticality processing on Linux and the related problems, collect and discuss alternatives for addressing the problems.
• A discussion led by Philipp Ahmann, Business Development Manager at Robert Bosch GmbH, about a new Industrial IoT (IIoT) Working Group within ELISA. The open forum will allow the community to discuss framing lightweight SOUP safety standards, but focusing on those touch points which are not fully covered by other use case driven working groups.

Speakers include thought leaders from ADIT GmbH, Arm, Bosch GmbH, Bytedance, Codethink, Huawei, Mobileye, The Linux Foundation, MITRE Corporation and Red Hat. Check out the schedule and register to attend the workshop today.

For more information about ELISA, visit https://elisa.tech/.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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