DriveOS HyperSafety unveiled as world-first single-ECU platform
Drako Tech has announced DriveOS HyperSafety as the automotive industry’s first single-ECU hard real-time automotive operating system.
The Drako DriveOS platform was launched in 2015 and has been battle-tested in Drako GTE and Drako Dragon high performance vehicles. It consolidates all vehicle subsystems, including control systems, ADAS, and digital cockpit into a single standard PC – reducing cost, enabling faster development, and delivering cyber-secure OTA updates. DriveOS supports all powertrain systems – ICE, EV and hybrid.
DriveOS HyperSafety launched
According to the San Jose-based US tech firm, DriveOS HyperSafety defines a new multi-layered standard for automotive safety performance — delivering predictable real-time performance under all operating conditions, offering:
- Ultra-safe driving responsiveness: Single-ECU architecture provides nanosecond-level control processing. DriveOS control and networking backbone delivers four times faster communication compared with multi-ECU TSN automotive ethernet.
- Continuous operation even if multiple components fail: The architecture deploys strict hardware isolation as well as hardware and software redundancy.
- Cyber-secure connectivity: An order-of-magnitude smaller code footprint, secure hardware partitioning, and on-chip memory communication between virtual ECUs dramatically reduce attack surfaces and streamline safety validation and OTA updates.
- AI guardrails: The entire communication flow is continuously analysed to detect & prevent erroneous operation.
Drako Tech provides systems, development environments, and reference designs that run natively on Drako DriveOS:
- Control systems development environment: The Drako Design Environment enables control engineers to build high-performance vehicle control systems directly from Simulink models, preserving their existing tools and workflows.
- Digital cockpit: Full-featured, customisable system ready to be branded and deployed, featuring high-resolution instrument cluster support, native navigation, advanced multimedia, vehicle and fleet management tools, and multi-display capabilities.
- ADAS development environment: A unified software foundation for building advanced driver assistance systems with ultra-low latency control and support for industry-standard AI platforms.
Automotive industry’s critical challenge
The industry’s common multi-ECU (electronic control unit) architectures struggle with integration complexity – seats, doors, lights, active and passive safety, suspension, thermal management, sensors, cameras, radars, lidars and actuators that vary across vehicle models. Each requires separate ECUs, creating integration complexity and restricting reuse, resulting in higher costs and slower time-to-market.
The shift to single-ECU architectures has previously been hindered by two fundamental barriers: 1) how to run safety-critical control systems alongside non-critical systems such as infotainment on the same ECU without interference, and 2) how to physically connect hundreds of diverse vehicle subsystems to a single compute unit.
Drako Tech is the first to solve both challenges – through a separation kernel that provides safety isolation and a unified electronics system that enables reliable, low latency connectivity across all vehicle domains.
Dean Drako, CEO of Drako Tech, said: “Nearly half of the cost of new vehicles is tied up in software and electronics. Drako Tech now offers all OEMs worldwide – regardless of size or influence – a definitive leap in their ability to deliver exceptionally safe, connected, AI-enhanced vehicles, with massive cost advantages. We are the first to achieve the ultimate goal – a single-ECU, hard real-time operating system and unified electronics architecture with mixed criticality – while providing OEMs a flexible deployment path.”
