SCSK and Vector will merge two small-ECU platforms on Renesas RL78/F2x chips
The two companies said they had begun co-creating a common software foundation for door, sensor and climate ECUs, combining Vector's MICROSAR IO with SCSK's QINeS-Lite and targeting a 50 to 80 percent cut in development effort.
SCSK said on September 30 that it had begun co-creating a common software foundation with Vector Informatik for the small ECUs that control vehicle doors, sensors and climate systems, dating the start of the work to that day.
The two will combine Vector’s MICROSAR IO, a lightweight platform for resource-constrained microcontrollers, with SCSK’s QINeS-Lite, a lightweight automotive platform the Tokyo company developed with Renesas Electronics for the 16-bit microcontrollers used in edge ECUs. SCSK said QINeS-Lite was built because edge ECUs that need real-time processing now also have to handle high-speed communication, software updates, cybersecurity and fault diagnosis, as control consolidates into zone ECUs under an evolving E/E architecture.
The first deliverable is a trial MCU edge-ECU software platform for Renesas RL78/F2x microcontrollers. SCSK said the trial aims to cut carmaker and supplier software development effort and edge-ECU development time by 50 to 80 percent. The roadmap runs in three phases: trial availability from October 2026, a development release in the second quarter of 2027, and a product release at the end of 2027.
SCSK said European carmakers and suppliers had increasingly asked to carry out small-ECU development inside the Vector environment, which it described as holding a large share of the automotive software industry. Vector’s own account of the work names the open Chiisai specification as the basis for SCSK’s drivers, lists CAN, LIN and 10BASE-T1S Ethernet among the buses MICROSAR IO supports, and gives Vector’s size as around 4,500 employees with 930 million euros of revenue in 2025.
SCSK and Renesas are both listed in Tokyo. Neither filed anything with the exchange on the collaboration, which is the expected treatment for a development agreement with no disclosed value.
Source: SCSK