Snapdragon Digital Chassis Workbench – end-to-end, cloud-based workflow for developers of software-defined vehicles

“Automotive development is evolving fast,” you say. “If we developers are going to evolve with it and build software-defined vehicles, then we need end-to-end application development technologies. Those technologies should be aligned with the infrastructure we use to write software. And, they should be cloud-based.”

We agree.

That’s why we’re launching Snapdragon Digital Chassis Workbench, a cloud-based workflow for developers building the software-defined vehicle. To complement the hardware and system-on-chips (SoCs) of the Digital Chassis, Workbench brings together our developer-oriented software technologies in an end-to-end workflow. Automotive developers access and use the technologies from the cloud to build applications that they run on cloud infrastructure based on Snapdragon.

And, at CES 2025, you can see our demonstration of a new Digital Chassis application that does just that. The demo successfully integrates developer-centric technologies from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and other auto industry leaders in developer-oriented infrastructure. The benefits for automotive application developers are complete, cloud-to-cloud, closed-loop dev and test environments.

The evolving developer experience in software-defined vehicles (SDVs)

Over the past few years, we’ve brought to the automotive domain the same developer-first mindset we’ve applied to mobile, compute, IoT and other domains.

For CES 2023, we announced the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC as a compute platform well suited to the cloud-native software development that SDVs require. By offering infrastructure for developing and deploying the SDV, the Flex SoC centralizes multiple mixed-criticality functions, reduces time to market for OEMs and sets the stage for new features over the lifetime of the vehicle.

For CES 2024, we proved the potential of cloud-native development, enabled by Snapdragon Digital Chassis and powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), with an automatic emergency braking (AEB) application as the workload. We demonstrated how developers can build automotive applications in the cloud from anywhere, without a physical evaluation kit or samples of the real hardware unit on their desks.

And now, at CES 2025, we’ll roll out the Snapdragon Digital Chassis Workbench, an integrated collection of cloud-based products you can use for automotive app development:

• Qualcomm Device Cloud – For developing and testing automotive code on Snapdragon, and powered by virtual SoCs (vSoCs)
• Qualcomm AI Hub – To evaluate pre-optimized AI models for automotive applications
• Qualcomm Code Collaboration – For agile collaboration with automotive OEMs and Tier-1s
• Snapdragon Ride Data Simulation Factory – DataOps for development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)
• Snapdragon Car-to-Cloud – For device and services management
• Snapdragon Virtual Cockpit and Snapdragon Virtual Ride – Cloud-based vSoCs providing functional parity with physical SoCs
• Qualcomm Cloud Ride – For accessing physical SoCs in the cloud and sharing across development teams

These cloud-based products are aligned with the types of infrastructure you use to write software:

• Integrated dev/test infrastructure
• Agile infrastructure
• Deployment infrastructure
• Cloud infrastructure based on Snapdragon

That’s how Workbench encompasses the technologies and types of infrastructure best suited to enable cloud-based development of your automotive applications. It accelerates deployment to your final target, maximizing the functional compatibility between the vSoC and the physical SoC.

CES 2025 demo: Cloud-to-cloud, closed-loop simulation

Based on the Snapdragon Digital Chassis Workbench, we’ve built, tested and deployed an automotive application for the software-defined vehicle (SDV) entirely from the cloud using production-ready technologies.

Our CES 2025 demo shows how an application can be tested on a vSoC available in QDC for Automotive combining active learning, cloud development and integration with mainstream technologies to streamline validation on the physical hardware. To illustrate how the Digital Chassis elements can harmoniously function as a full SDV platform, the application relies on our cloud-based, developer-centric technologies:

• Snapdragon Virtual Cockpit
• Snapdragon Virtual Ride
• Data Simulation Factory
• Qualcomm Device Cloud
• Snapdragon Car to Cloud

To highlight the versatility of Workbench, we’ve built the demo using services and expertise from a variety of ecosystem partners, as shown in the image below.

Our demo highlights how you can use QDC for Automotive together with vSoC and the Data Simulation Factory pipeline to accelerate deployment to the edge for final validation. You can now complete the whole process in hours instead of months. Moreover, it shows the modularity of Workbench: you can use familiar, already available technologies and products to create an agile framework for cloud-to-cloud connectivity and a complete simulation loop. This framework, finally, provides great flexibility to your own application development, so you can work with Snapdragon-optimized products and collaborate with your preferred industry leaders.

The demo shows how you can validate your software running on the SoC in the Workbench integrating products from Synopsys and MathWorks, that allow you to easily inject stimuli and run complex simulations. So, you can now instantiate virtual architectures and test complex ADAS applications within the built-in security and low-latency connectivity provided by the AWS cloud infrastructure. And, for final validation, you can efficiently use the same simulations to test on physical SoC, creating the foundations for faster, high-quality software development and quicker deployment in vehicles.

Benefits of the Digital Chassis Workbench

The Workbench gives OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and automotive application developers access to three important elements:

1. Virtual SoCs (vSoCs)

Working in the cloud can expedite the development process while allowing you to validate new technologies in a virtual environment (digital twin) before your real-world development begins.

You can develop and test software even when hardware is shared across teams or not yet available. You can shorten the validation cycle from months to days for advanced safety functions like braking and navigation by running in the cloud before testing on physical hardware. And virtual SoCs scale out across the software development environment.

2. Data-driven development

Vehicles are rich sources of data. When you capture the vast amount of data from vehicles in cloud-based storage and integrate it with your development workflow, you can:

• Scale applications and accelerate development, whether broadly or in specific use cases
• Harness the power of AI and process data in the cloud for insights on new features, functionality and services
• Combine data shared by vehicle occupants with sensor data from the vehicle's surroundings for highly personalized and contextually relevant service offerings
• Take actionable insights from diagnostic data for a better understanding of how future vehicles will perform in real-world environments
• Reduce costs and accelerate development time by correcting errors (system or application crashes, exhausted memory, etc.) during pre-production testing

3. Cloud-based development

With the digital twin, you can select and develop software on configurable virtual hardware. The binary parity between the cloud and the edge lets you validate designs faster because your code is more portable. The execution environment transition becomes seamless, and you can move from cloud-based vSoC to physical hardware and back throughout your development and validation cycle.

Cloud-native development of the SDV means continuous innovation and agile development. You can respond more quickly to market demands and technological evolutions. Workbench offers the scalability and 24/7 global access to accelerate development.

In the cloud:

• Virtual hardware platforms remove hardware bottlenecks, so you can left-shift your development and get to market faster.
• End-to-end (E2E) testing enhances application reliability at every level of software validation.
• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) automates the building, testing and deployment processes, shortening the time required to release new features and updates.

Come see us at CES 2025

Are you developing applications for the software-defined vehicle? Want to see what the future holds for you? Look for us at CES 2025 from January 7 to 10. We’ll be conducting demos at booth 5000 in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Find out how you’ll access and use cloud-native technologies to build applications ready to run on cloud infrastructure based on Snapdragon.