There is good news for our automotive customers, who can now benefit from even faster firmware updates in Electronic Control Units (ECUs). The reason? eSOL has licensed SEGGER's easy-to-use emCompress compression software. It dramatically cuts update times in embedded systems across a range of applications where size is critical, and can decompress data on even the smallest microcontrollers.

Source: SEGGER

In the automotive sector, bus systems such as CAN (Controller Area Network) are a common standard – but not always the quickest. To counter these limitations, the ideal solution for developers working with the AUTOSAR Classic platform would be to reduce the quantity of data transferred. However, as the information in any firmware update must remain complete, compression is the logical choice.
emCompress supports the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) to perform lossless data compression. It is also compatible with other algorithms such as LZMA2.

Firmware images can typically be compressed by up to four times, slashing update time by up to three-quarters. What’s more, the decompression algorithm also supports files created by PC-based tools such as 7-ZIP or Lzip which use LZMA too.

"Thanks to the highly effective implementation of the state-of-the-art compression algorithms in SEGGER's emCompress, we can significantly speed up ECU firmware updates," explained Bob N. Ueyama, Executive Vice-President at eSOL. “Time spent in the garage for a firmware update now can be reduced to an absolute minimum."

"While the firmware of automotive ECUs is getting more and more comprehensive with each vehicle generation, updates in the garage are very often still done using existing tools for the CAN-bus", added SEGGER CEO Ivo Geilenbruegge. "We are very pleased to see that our emCompress solution is a key component for eSOL to drastically reduce update times for their customers."

Boasting a compact footprint, and low CPU load, emCompress software is written in well-commented ANSI C and is both compiler and target independent. It is customer-friendly, needing no open-source or required-attribution license; emCompress can also be integrated into any commercial or proprietary product, and no requirement to attribute the vendor or disclose the combined source.

Furthermore, SEGGER supports the particular needs of automotive customers, such as MISRA compliance and extensive regression tests, making emCompress an ideal solution for ECU firmware updates. Find more information about emCompress here: https://www.segger.com/products/compression/emcompress/.

Reference:
Segger's press release: eSOL licences SEGGER emCompress for accelerating automotive firmware updates (Released on August 16, 2021)

R.I
Marketing team