Vector Informatik

Last updated
Vector Informatik
Type GmbH
IndustrySoftware
Founded1 April 1988
HeadquartersStuttgart, Weilimdorf, Germany
Key people
Managing directors [1]
  • Dr. Thomas Beck
  • Dr. Stefan Krauß [2]
  • Thomas Riegraf
Products CANalyzer, CANoe, CANape, CANdelaStudio, PREEvision
Revenue510 million EUR (2018) [3]
770 million EUR (Vector Group worldwide, 2019) [2]
Number of employees
3000 (Vector Group worldwide, 2020) [4]
Website www.vector.com
View from the south towards the main building of the Vector campus in Stuttgart, Holderackerstr. 36 VectorCampus Stuttgart Weilimdorf MarcGilardone.png
View from the south towards the main building of the Vector campus in Stuttgart, Holderäckerstr. 36

Vector Informatik develops software tools and components for networking of electronic systems based on the serial bus systems CAN, LIN, FlexRay, MOST, Ethernet, AFDX, ARINC 429, [5] and SAE J1708 as well as on CAN-based protocols such as SAE J1939, SAE J1587, ISO 11783, NMEA 2000, ARINC 825, [5] CANaerospace, [5] CANopen and more. The headquarters of the company Vector Informatik GmbH is in Stuttgart, Germany. Subsidiaries include Braunschweig, Munich, Hamburg, Regensburg along with international subsidiaries in Brazil, China, France, Italy, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Austria, Sweden, and the United States. Vector Informatik also includes Vector Consulting Services GmbH, a consulting firm specializing in the optimization of technical product development. Altogether, these companies are referred to as the Vector Group.

Contents

History

Vector Software GmbH was founded on April 1, 1988, by Eberhard Hinderer, Martin Litschel, and Helmut Schelling. In the year 1992, the company changed its name to Vector Informatik GmbH. In the same year, the first CANalyzer license was sold and the company attained sales of one million Euros for the first time. In 1996, the first CANoe and CANape licenses were sold.

In 1998, Vector CANtech (United States) was founded, and in the following year Vector Japan. In 2001, the subsidiary Vector Consulting GmbH was founded, which offers consulting services for engineering development and its cost-effectiveness. In 2006, Vector Informatik acquired "Division 4m Software" from Micron Electronic Devices AG. In the same year, sales of the Vector Group exceeded the 100 million Euro mark for the first time. In the following year, Vector Korea was founded, and in 2009 Vector Great Britain, Vector Informatik India, and Vector China. [6] 2011 the previous representation office in China was converted into a legally independent business. [7] In August 2011 the four owners of Vector Informatik GmbH have transferred their business shares to a family foundation and a non-profit foundation. [8] In 2013, a new subsidiary Vector Austria was established, [9] followed 2014 by Vector Brasil and Vector Italy. [10] [11]

In February 2017, Vector Informatik has acquired 100% of the US company Vector Software, Inc., which develops an embedded software testing platform VectorCAST. [12]

In June 2018, Vector Informatik has acquired 100% of the French company Squoring Technologies SAS, which develops the Squore software analytics platform. [13]

In March 2022, Vector Informatik acquired 100% of the assets of the US company, Gimpel Software LLC, a producer of static analysis software. [14]

Fields of activity

Vector handles networking of electronic systems based on the serial bus systems CAN, LIN, FlexRay and MOST as well as CAN-based protocols such as SAE J1939 and CANopen. Electronic control modules in vehicles are the company's focus. Experience gained in this area has also been applied to other areas such as avionics, [5] heavy-duty vehicles, special machines, and embedded systems in general. A selection of articles and case studies provides additional background:

Products

Some of the company's key products are:

Related Research Articles

A Controller Area Network is a robust vehicle bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other's applications without a host computer. It is a message-based protocol, designed originally for multiplex electrical wiring within automobiles to save on copper, but it can also be used in many other contexts. For each device, the data in a frame is transmitted serially but in such a way that if more than one device transmits at the same time, the highest priority device can continue while the others back off. Frames are received by all devices, including by the transmitting device.

OSEK is a standards body that has produced specifications for an embedded operating system, a communications stack, and a network management protocol for automotive embedded systems. It has produced related specifications, namely AUTOSAR. OSEK was designed to provide a reliable standard software architecture for the various electronic control units (ECUs) throughout a car.

A vehicle bus is a specialized internal communications network that interconnects components inside a vehicle. In electronics, a bus is simply a device that connects multiple electrical or electronic devices together. Special requirements for vehicle control such as assurance of message delivery, of non-conflicting messages, of minimum time of delivery, of low cost, and of EMF noise resilience, as well as redundant routing and other characteristics mandate the use of less common networking protocols. Protocols include Controller Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnect Network (LIN) and others. Conventional computer networking technologies are rarely used, except in aircraft, where implementations of the ARINC 664 such as the Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet are used. Aircraft that use AFDX include the B787, the A400M and the A380. Trains commonly use Ethernet Consist Network (ECN). All cars sold in the United States since 1996 are required to have an On-Board Diagnostics connector, for access to the car's electronic controllers.

Society of Automotive Engineers standard SAE J1939 is the vehicle bus recommended practice used for communication and diagnostics among vehicle components. Originating in the car and heavy-duty truck industry in the United States, it is now widely used in other parts of the world.

AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR) is a development partnership of automotive interested parties founded in 2003. It pursues the objective to create and establish an open and standardized software architecture for automotive electronic control units (ECUs). Goals include the scalability to different vehicle and platform variants, transferability of software, the consideration of availability and safety requirements, a collaboration between various partners, sustainable use of natural resources, and maintainability during the product lifecycle.

MISRA C is a set of software development guidelines for the C programming language developed by The MISRA Consortium. Its aims are to facilitate code safety, security, portability and reliability in the context of embedded systems, specifically those systems programmed in ISO C / C90 / C99.

Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems or ASAM is an incorporated association under German law. Its members are primarily international car manufacturers, suppliers and engineering service providers from the automotive industry. The association coordinates the development of technical standards, which are developed by working groups composed of experts from its member companies. ASAM pursues the vision that the tools of a development process chain can be freely interconnected and allow a seamless exchange of data. The standards define protocols, data models, file formats and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the use in the development and testing of automotive electronic control units. A large amount of popular tools in the areas of simulation, measurement, calibration and test automation are compliant to ASAM standards. Compliance shall guarantee interoperability of tools from different vendors, allow data exchange without the need for converters, and facilitate the exchange of unambiguous specification between customers and suppliers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CANape</span> Software tool by Vector Informatik

CANape is a software tool from Vector Informatik. This development software, widely used by OEMs and ECU suppliers of automotive industries is used to calibrate algorithms in ECUs at runtime.

CANalyzer is an analysis software tool from Vector Informatik GmbH. This development software is primarily used by automotive and electronic control unit suppliers to analyze the data traffic in serial bus systems. The most relevant bus systems to CANalyzer are CAN, LIN, FlexRay, Ethernet and MOST, as well as CAN-based protocols such as J1939, CANopen, and ARINC 825.

CANoe is a development and testing software tool from Vector Informatik GmbH. The software is primarily used by automotive manufacturers and electronic control unit (ECU) suppliers for development, analysis, simulation, testing, diagnostics and start-up of ECU networks and individual ECUs. Its widespread use and large number of supported vehicle bus systems makes it especially well suited for ECU development in conventional vehicles, as well as hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles. The simulation and testing facilities in CANoe are performed with CAPL, a programming language.

The ETAS Group is a German company which designs tools for the development of embedded systems for the automotive industry and other sectors of the embedded industry. ETAS is 100-percent subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">INCA (software)</span> Application software published by ETAS

INCA is a measurement, calibration and diagnostic software published by ETAS. With its large installation base in the auto industry, this development software is deployed during all phases of the development of electronic control units (ECUs) and ECU software programs for measuring, calibration, diagnostics and programming.

Astrée is a static analyzer based on abstract interpretation. It analyzes programs written in the C programming language and outputs an exhaustive list of possible runtime errors and assertion violations. The defect classes covered include divisions by zero, buffer overflows, dereferences of null or dangling pointers, data races, deadlocks, etc. Astrée includes a static taint checker and helps finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, such as Spectre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RT-RK</span>

RT-RK is a Serbian R&D company and national research institute that delivers development services and own products in the arena of real time embedded systems, with focus on consumer electronics and automotive industry. Headquartered in Novi Sad, with offices in Belgrade, Banja Luka and Osijek (Croatia) with over 550 engineers, RT-RK is one of the biggest development houses in Southeast Europe.

MOST is a high-speed multimedia network technology optimized by the automotive industry. It can be used for applications inside or outside the car. The serial MOST bus uses a daisy-chain topology or ring topology and synchronous data communication to transport audio, video, voice and data signals via plastic optical fiber (POF) or electrical conductor physical layers.

dSPACE GmbH, located in Paderborn, Germany, is one of the world's leading providers of tools for developing electronic control units.

XCP (or) "Universal Measurement and Calibration Protocol" is a network protocol originating from ASAM for connecting calibration systems to electronic control units, ECUs. It enables read and write access to variables and memory contents of microcontroller systems at runtime. Entire datasets can be acquired or stimulated synchronous to events triggered by timers or operating conditions. In addition, XCP also supports programming of flash memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OPEN Alliance SIG</span>

The OPEN Alliance is a non-profit, special interest group (SIG) of mainly automotive industry and technology providers collaborating to encourage wide scale adoption of Ethernet-based communication as the standard in automotive networking applications.

Unified Diagnostic Services (UDS) is a diagnostic communication protocol used in electronic control units (ECUs) within automotive electronics, which is specified in the ISO 14229-1. It is derived from ISO 14230-3 (KWP2000) and the now obsolete ISO 15765-3. 'Unified' in this context means that it is an international and not a company-specific standard. By now this communication protocol is used in all new ECUs made by Tier 1 suppliers of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), and is incorporated into other standards, such as AUTOSAR. The ECUs in modern vehicles control nearly all functions, including electronic fuel injection (EFI), engine control, the transmission, anti-lock braking system, door locks, braking, window operation, and more.

ECU-TEST is a software tool developed by TraceTronic GmbH, based in Dresden, Germany, for test and validation of embedded systems. Since the first release of ECU-TEST in 2003, the software is used as standard tool in the development of automotive ECUs and increasingly in the development of heavy machinery as well as in factory automation. The development of the software started within a research project on systematic testing of control units and laid the foundation for the spin-off of TraceTronic GmbH from TU Dresden. ECU-TEST aims at the specification, implementation, documentation, execution and assessment of test cases. Owing to various test automation methods, the tool ensures an efficient implementation of all necessary activities for the creation, execution and assessment of test cases.

References

  1. ↑ Imprint of Vector Informatik website, retrieved 2021-01-23
  2. 1 2 Press release "Vector Informatik Expands Board of Directors", published 2021-01-04
  3. ↑ Revenue 2018 in the Bundesanzeiger (ger)
  4. ↑ Member profile at the Association for Standardisation of Automation and Measuring Systems
  5. 1 2 3 4 CAN Based Protocols in Avionics, retrieved 2021-01-23
  6. ↑ Address information on the Vector website
  7. ↑ Press release "Vector establishes subsidiary in China"
  8. ↑ Press release "Holders transfer ownership of Vector Informatik GmbH to two foundations"
  9. ↑ Press release "Vector open subsidiary in Austria"
  10. ↑ Press release "Vector Informatik opens subsidiary in Brazil"
  11. ↑ Vector company history, retrieved 2021-01-23
  12. ↑ Press release "Vector Informatik acquires USA-based Vector Software, Inc."
  13. ↑ Press release "Vector Acquires French Squoring Technologies"
  14. ↑ "Vector Informatik acquires USA-based Gimpel Software LLC, the makers of PC-lint". Automotive World. 2022-03-18. Retrieved 2022-03-20.
  15. ↑ Diagnostic Validation with GM, published in ATZ Elektronik, 6/2008
  16. ↑ Flexray Tools support PDU-Based Comms, published 2009-03-19 in Electronic Product Design & Test
  17. ↑ Optimizing driver assistance systems at BMW
  18. ↑ AUTOSAR-compatible XCP software modules for FlexRay ECUs, published in EE Times 2008-08-21
  19. ↑ ODX Process from the Perspective of an Automotive Supplier
  20. ↑ (German)Barbara Lange: CANoe.IP unterstützt Car-to-Car-Entwicklung in iX. Heise Verlag, Hannover 9/2009, SSN 0935-9680.
  21. ↑ German report of the Chamber of Commerce for the Stuttgart Region: Stuttgart-based Vector Informatik GmbH is world leader in software for networked electronic systems in automobiles Archived 2012-09-07 at archive.today
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