Honda, Toyota among OEMs endorsing Panasonic VirtIO push

Panasonic Automotive Systems has secured endorsement for its VirtIO device virtualisation standardisation initiative from Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, and Mitsubishi Motors, along with technology partners including Google, Qualcomm, AMD, Arm, Renesas, and MediaTek. The company has also completed development of a VirtIO-compliant in-vehicle software platform for cockpit domain controllers.

VirtIO is an open-source virtualisation standard advanced by industry groups including Automotive Grade Linux, OASIS, and SOAFEE. Its adoption allows software to run across different hardware platforms, enabling development and testing to begin before physical vehicle hardware is available — a critical capability as the industry moves toward software-defined vehicle architectures.

Panasonic Automotive has been developing VirtIO for automotive applications since 2018. Alongside the platform, it has developed vSkipGen, a VirtIO-compliant virtual hardware solution used internally and available to external partners. AWS has confirmed that vehicle operating systems and applications developed in its cloud environment using vSkipGen run with environmental parity on physical ECUs.

Google noted that VirtIO has been the standard I/O interface in Android Automotive OS for several years, while Nissan highlighted its ability to enable high-precision cloud-native verification using common binaries that closely replicate real-vehicle behaviour. Panasonic Automotive says it will continue developing VirtIO-compliant automotive software as SDV adoption accelerates.

Source: PRNewsWire