PoV – How SOAFEE is Enabling Automotive SDVs?
The automotive landscape is undergoing a revolution. No longer defined solely by mechanical innovation or horsepower, today’s vehicles are powered by sophisticated software systems that deliver smarter, safer, and continuously evolving experiences.
Traditionally, automotive software was tightly coupled with hardware. Introducing new features meant rewriting code and retesting across multiple hardware variants. This process was costly and slow. However, end users now expect advanced functionalities, enhanced safety, and regular updates.
The Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) introduces cloud-native development practices to embedded automotive systems, preserving safety, security, and real-time performance. By decoupling hardware and software, it enables a “build once, validate everywhere” strategy, allowing automakers to deploy updates efficiently and securely.
To understand how SOAFEE delivers this shift, the following Q&A explores its principles, capabilities, and the critical qualities it ensures.
Q1. Why do we need a new approach for automotive software?
Modern vehicles are increasingly like rolling data centers, running workloads such as ADAS, infotainment, AI inference, and connected services. Traditional tightly-coupled hardware/software development is too rigid to meet today’s performance, safety, and time-to-market demands.
A modern, cloud-native architecture is essential to:
- Support continuous software evolution without full vehicle recalls
- Maintain real-time determinism for safety-critical functions
- Enable modular deployment and multi-platform reuse
Q2. What is SOAFEE, and how does it help?
SOAFEE (Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge) adapts cloud-native principles such as containers, orchestration, and CI/CD to automotive systems. It decouples software from hardware while ensuring deterministic real-time behavior, safety, and security.
Its foundation uses secure, modular containers and virtualization to isolate safety-critical workloads (e.g., braking, steering) from non-critical applications (e.g., infotainment). This allows software to be developed once and deployed across multiple hardware platforms with minimal revalidation, supporting faster feature rollout and OTA updates.
SOAFEE also supports mixed-criticality workloads, allowing different software components with varying safety and timing requirements to run concurrently on the same hardware without interference. In addition, it integrates real-time monitoring and telemetry, enabling proactive diagnostics, performance tracking, and enhanced safety oversight.
Q3. How does SOAFEE lower the barrier for innovation?
Historically, only companies with deep automotive expertise could develop in-vehicle software using:
- Early virtual prototyping and simulation before hardware is available
- Automated CI/CD pipelines that accelerate iteration cycles
- Secure OTA updates without costly recalls
SOAFEE lowers the barrier for innovation by leveraging familiar cloud-native tools, enabling startups, app developers, and cloud engineers to contribute features ranging from AI-based driver monitoring to in-car personalization, while still respecting real-time performance, safety, and security requirements.
Q4. What does SOAFEE mean for OEMs and Tier-1s?
Nowadays, the need for personalization and cutting-edge technologies is rising. OEMs and Tier-1s have the following goals:
- Faster time-to-market for new features and updates
- Software reuse across platforms, reducing development cost and effort
- New business models, such as subscriptions and feature-on-demand
- Cost efficiency through modular, validated software components
SOAFEE enables OEMs and Tier-1s to achieve this shift from one-off vehicle programs to a continuous software delivery model.
The framework supports parallel development streams, allowing multiple teams to innovate without impacting safety-critical functions. Combined with its design for safety, reliability, and maintainability, this allows OEMs and Tier-1s to respond quickly to market shifts, regulatory changes, and customer expectations while reducing development risk.
Q5. How does SOAFEE balance agility with safety?
Automotive software must meet strict Functional Safety (FuSa) and cybersecurity standards and maintain real-time performance. SOAFEE achieves this by:
- Running safety-critical workloads in isolated, real-time containers
- Allocating dedicated compute resources to prevent interference from non-critical apps
- Enforcing secure communication protocols and continuous monitoring for cyber threats
OTA updates are encrypted, authenticated, and verified end-to-end, ensuring that agile software delivery does not compromise safety or security. Combined with mixed-criticality support and telemetry capabilities, SOAFEE ensures developers retain cloud-like agility without compromising determinism, safety, reliability, or security.
Q.6 Why does hardware design still matter in a SOAFEE world?
SOAFEE abstracts software workloads, but these still run on physical hardware with constraints on real-time performance, power, and safety compliance. The right SoC selection, board design, and resource allocation are critical to guarantee that containers meet latency and determinism targets.
Well-designed hardware also supports mixed-criticality workloads through memory protection and virtualization, and includes security primitives like secure boot and crypto accelerators. Modular and scalable architectures ensure workloads can evolve, while virtualized testing allows early validation before silicon is finalized.
This ensures that SOAFEE’s promise of safe, reliable, and agile SDV software delivery translates from lab simulations to production vehicles.
Q7. How can MosChip® services help OEMs and Tier-1s adopt SOAFEE?
MosChip® brings a full-stack perspective, bridging hardware, embedded software, and cloud-native practices:
- Hardware design & validation: Platforms optimized for latency, safety, compute efficiency, and scalability
- Embedded systems & FuSa: MCAL, drivers, real-time OS, ISO 26262 compliance, ensuring reliability
- SOAFEE (car-to-cloud) enablement: Virtualization, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and secure OTA mechanisms
- Custom silicon design & validation: Support for pre- and post-silicon development, including design, verification, and pre-compliance testing, ensuring hardware meets SDV requirements and can run SOAFEE workloads efficiently
This ensures OEMs and Tier-1 companies get a practical, production-ready pathway to SDVs, meeting critical requirements for real-time performance, safety, reliability, and cybersecurity.
Beyond technical expertise, MosChip® emphasizes process maturity, agile practices, and robust engineering governance, ensuring predictable delivery and high-quality results. Our work reflects core values of safety, reliability, and collaboration, giving OEMs and Tier-1s confidence in both execution and long-term partnership.
This combined approach, blending technical excellence with disciplined, value-focused processes, offers OEMs and Tier-1s a practical, production-ready route to SDVs, fulfilling essential demands for real-time operation, safety, reliability, and cybersecurity.
To see a live demo of SOAFEE, meet our team at Embedded World North America 2025, Booth #4068 in Anaheim, CA.
Schedule a meeting with us, and our team will give you a guided walkthrough of some of our innovations.
