ETAS and design services specialist PLC2 Design enter into pioneering partnership

• Holistic solutions for the software-defined vehicle
• Data measurement, processing, and analysis from a single source
• Partnership rounds off ETAS metrology portfolio
• ETAS takes over exclusive sales and distribution of PLC2 Design products for the automotive market

Stuttgart/Freiburg, April 1, 2022 –  ETAS and PLC2 Design are entering into a close partnership. This includes a minority shareholding of ETAS in PLC2 Design. Both parties signed a corresponding agreement on March 31, 2022, subject to approval by the antitrust authorities. The parties have agreed not to disclose the financial details.

Data acquisition and processing is essential for the realization of software-defined vehicles. The new holistic solution from ETAS and PLC2 Design allows sophisticated customer software to be validated realistically in the AD/DA environment. In future, this will provide a faster, more reliable, and more efficient way of providing solutions for software-defined vehicles to manufacturers and other suppliers.

ETAS' portfolio includes vehicle basic software, middleware, and development tools for the realization of software-defined vehicles. The company PLC2 Design, headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, and a subsidiary of PLC2, offers design services and develops products in the areas of FPGA (field-programmable gate array) and embedded systems. It also provides professional seminars and training courses for the embedded market, with a specific focus on AMD/Xilinx technologies. PLC2 Design’s cooperation with Bosch subsidiary ETAS builds upon its previous close collaboration with the Bosch division Cross-Domain Computing Solutions. Within the scope of various joint projects, a series of open, modular solutions were developed that can now be offered to all OEMs and Tier1s.

By partnering with PLC2 Design, ETAS has rounded off its metrology portfolio in the areas of in-vehicle data pre-processing and edge computing / high-performance data logging. Access to the ETAS sales and distribution network will enable PLC2 Design to market its products globally, and the company will focus on its main business of developing highly innovative products. In future, this will allow ETAS and PLC2 to offer a holistic solution from a single source that includes data measurement directly at the data source as well as data logging and data analysis.

The products that will be incorporated in the ETAS portfolio include the ADL-1000 – a high-perfor­mance, energy-saving, and customizable data logging system and innovative edge accelerator – and the PGC-1000, a high-performance PCIe grabbing and accelerator card for offloading computationally intensive algorithms to relieve the burden on commercial data logging systems. This enables the use of mid-range PCs and reduces the need for costly multi-processor computers.

Another new addition to the portfolio is the FPGA-based IP core (PLC2 L5) for lossless video com­pression and decompression for a wide range of applications on edge devices and in the cloud with data reduction of up to 60 percent.

PLC2 Design’s current and future product portfolio will be marketed exclusively by ETAS in the automotive market as system components of a holistic solution.

Press photo:

Signing of contract by Christoph Hartung (front left), President and Chairman of the ETAS Board of Management, and Stefan Krassin (front right), Managing Director and CEO, PLC2 Design GmbH