How PAVE360 helps set a path toward the automotive digital twin

The new PAVE360 pre-silicon autonomous validation environment from Siemens crystallizes the company’s integration of its automotive verification and validation products, and reflects its vision of the digital twin.

The overarching idea behind PAVE360 is to unite silicon development with virtualized sensor inputs, mechantronic implementations and simulations of urban traffic conditions. To that end, it pulls together a wide range of tools and targets multiple ‘silicon-to-city’ developers in an automotive design process.

From its EDA business Mentor, Siemens is drawing on software such as the Questa simulator and Veloce emulator as well as the Catapult high-level synthesis family. These contribute to PAVE360 alongside two Simcenter tools: PreScan for environmental simulation and AMEsim for mechatronic simulation (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The main components and realms covered within the PAVE360 platform (Siemens)

Siemens has been working on this integration since acquiring Mentor (an earlier version is discussed here). The commercial ‘closed-loop’ digital-twin style implementation has also been put on live display at the Center for Practical Autonomy Lab in Novi, Michigan. The company plans to offer similar demonstrations globally.

PAVE360 and the ‘closed loop’

“PAVE360 from Siemens enables everyone in the automotive value chain to develop custom SoCs, optimized for the performance, power, safety, thermal and form factor requirements of driver assisted and fully automated vehicles in a completely virtual environment,” said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

“PAVE360 is part of a complete, closed-loop simulation solution from Siemens that allows designers to test everything from silicon development to full vehicle validation.”

Tirias has also released a free-to-download report looking at the breadth of the PAVE360 platform, AV simulation extends to silicon.

Stefan Jockusch, Vice President – Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software, also described at this year’s DVCon China how Siemens is looking to apply this kind of thinking to digital twins that extend beyond discrete products.