By Chahinez Hamlaoui, Robert Fey, and David Howarth

The automotive industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Vehicles are no longer just mechanical machines, they are becoming sophisticated, software-defined platforms packed with electronics and intelligence. As the number of electronic control units (ECUs) in modern vehicles climbs (with some cars now containing up to 150 ECUs), the challenge of integrating, verifying, and validating the complex interplay between hardware and software intensifies. This complexity has driven a growing need for virtualization in automotive software development.

The shift to software-defined vehicles (SDVs)

Today’s vehicles are a fusion of hardware and software from multiple suppliers, each with their own dependencies and integration requirements. The demand for new features, faster time to market, and higher quality is relentless. Consumers, especially younger generations, expect seamless digital experiences in their cars, from streaming music to watching videos while charging their electric vehicles.

But with these advancements comes greater complexity. In North America, more than 65% of vehicles were recalled in 2022 due to electronics or software defects. The pressure to reduce development cycles, manage recalls, and innovate rapidly has never been higher. Traditional development and testing approaches are struggling to keep pace.

The limitations of traditional testing

Historically, the integration of hardware and software was a sequential process. Software would be developed and tested only after the hardware was available, leading to bottlenecks and delayed issue discovery. Physical test benches (Hardware-in-the-Loop, or HIL) are expensive, limited in availability, and time-consuming to configure and maintain, all of which impacts test coverage and scalability of the testing strategies. As a result, integration issues due to several bugs often surface late in the development cycle, sometimes even leaving cars unsellable in parking lots while software glitches are resolved.

Yet in today’s development landscape, the greatest delay often arises not from hardware availability but from organizational processes. Validating a new function in the vehicle typically requires a complete application build, ECU flashing and mounting, and only then can the function be tested in the car. For high-integration ECUs, this cycle can take 10–20 weeks or longer. If a minor change is needed, the entire loop starts anew—slowing innovation and feedback dramatically.

Enter virtualization and electronics digital twins

Virtualization addresses these challenges by enabling the creation of electronics digital twins (eDTs), virtual representations of the vehicle’s electronics and their environment. Instead of waiting for physical prototypes, developers can build, test, and validate software on virtual ECUs (vECUs) that accurately mimic the behavior of real hardware at various levels of abstraction.

Crucially, virtualization is not just about avoiding hardware waits, it is about bypassing organizational delays. Developers can immediately try out new functionality in a realistic simulation environment, long before it reaches the vehicle. For example, speed-limit scenarios (such as 100 → 50 or 50 → 30) can be set up and tested virtually, allowing instant refinement of logic and accelerating application maturity.

This Shift-Left approach offers several key benefits:

• Parallel Development: Multiple teams can develop and test software concurrently, starting months earlier than with physical prototypes thereby increasing test coverage.
• Early Integration Testing: Software components from different suppliers can be integrated and tested virtually, reducing late-stage surprises.
• Automated and Scalable Testing: Virtual environments can be deployed in the cloud, allowing for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, automated regression testing, and rapid feedback loops.
• Regression Safety Net: Building a regression test base in parallel allows teams to validate that new features work without degrading existing functionality.
• Traceability and Coverage: Tools like TPT provide structured evaluation, linking test results back to requirements and functions, ensuring systematic coverage.
• Cost and Time Savings: By shifting much of the testing to virtual platforms, organizations reduce their reliance on expensive HIL setups, minimize downtime, and accelerate overall development timelines.
• Improved Quality: Virtualization enables more thorough testing at the unit, component, and system levels, catching issues that might be missed in physical testing alone and reducing the risk of costly recalls.

Real-world impact

Leading automotive companies are already reaping the rewards of virtualization. For example, Mercedes-Benz has demonstrated how identical test cases can run on both virtual and physical test benches, streamlining the feedback process and improving software accuracy with each iteration. Automation and virtual testing have enabled some organizations to reduce validation cycles from nearly a month to just a few days.

Ecosystem and openness

The success of virtualization hinges on interoperability and strong ecosystem partnerships. Open APIs and integration frameworks ensure that tools from different vendors can work together seamlessly. This is essential for manufacturers who must coordinate software and hardware from a diverse supplier base.

Rethinking the testing paradigm

Virtualization is more than just a replacement for physical testing, an opportunity to rethink the entire development and validation process. By enabling modular, unit-level testing and flexible integration at multiple abstraction levels, organizations can find and fix issues earlier, simplify test management, and support over-the-air software updates with confidence.

Most importantly, virtualization removes the organizational gap between “function handed over for integration” and “first observable behavior in the car,” empowering developers to iterate rapidly and deliver mature applications faster.

Advancing automotive software development through a comprehensive solution for integrated virtualization

Synopsys and IPG Automotive are working closely together to provide a comprehensive virtualization environment for automotive software development and testing. By combining eDTs with high-fidelity vehicle and environment simulation, they are helping the industry address the growing complexity of SDVs, enabling earlier development, enhanced quality, and shorter time to market.

Electronics digital twin integration

• Synopsys provides advanced solutions for creating eDTs allowing engineers to develop and test automotive software in a virtual environment before physical hardware is available.
• IPG Automotive specializes in simulating virtual vehicle prototypes, vehicle dynamics, and scenario-based testing through tools like CarMaker. By integrating Synopsys’s virtual ECUs (vECUs) with IPG’s virtual vehicle prototypes, developers can test real software in realistic driving scenarios.

System-level co-simulation

Synopsys Silver and IPG CarMaker enable seamless system integration, allowing multiple virtual ECUs integrated into a virtualized vehicle to interact in a realistic simulation environment. This helps teams perform integration testing earlier, identify issues sooner, and optimize the entire system before moving to physical prototypes.

The combined solution supports automated test orchestration, where test scenarios, execution, and results analysis can be managed efficiently. This is especially valuable in CI/CD pipelines, reducing manual effort and accelerating validation cycles.

Ecosystem and openness

Both Synopsys and IPG emphasize interoperability and open APIs, ensuring their tools work together and can be integrated with other solutions in the automotive development ecosystem. This approach makes it easier for OEMs and suppliers to bring together diverse software and hardware components.

The path forward

The adoption of eDTs and virtualization in automotive software development is already transforming the industry. It empowers companies to:

• Start development earlier and in parallel.
• Increase productivity and reduce costs.
• Shorten time to market for new vehicles and features.
• Build a regression safety net and ensure systematic test coverage.
• Deliver higher-quality, safer, and more reliable SDVs.

As the industry continues to evolve toward ever-more complex, connected, and intelligent vehicles, virtualization will be the bedrock enabling faster innovation, seamless integration, and robust quality assurance. The future of automotive lies in embracing these digital tools—not just for efficiency, but for unlocking the full potential of software-defined mobility.

Robert Fey is a manager within Synopsys for the TPT test automation solution.

David Howarth is director of global sales strategy at IPG Automotive.