SOAFEE
At Arm, I worked with the CTO of ADLINK to onboard their SOAFEE reference design to Arm, enabling a new generation of autonomous vehicle reference platforms on the Arm architecture.
Problem
A car is becoming a computer that drives. The software under it had no common ground. Every automaker, every tier-one supplier, and every silicon vendor was building their own stack.
Solution
SOAFEE, Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge, is Arm's open standard for software-defined vehicles. It puts cloud-native tooling and container orchestration together with automotive functional safety. That combination had not been done before.
I worked with the CTO of ADLINK to onboard their reference design to Arm. The platform runs on Ampere Altra. A developer builds and deploys on that machine. The previous path was cross-compiling and cross-debugging against a target you cannot see. The reference stack is ROS 2 with Autoware, Cyclone DDS and iceoryx underneath, and Zenoh for vehicle-to-everything.
Analysis
My part was enablement. Getting the reference design into the hands of developers outside the companies that designed it. A specification and working silicon still leave a developer with nothing to start from.
