Drako Tech has announced DriveOS with HyperSafety, which the company describes 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 subsystem, including control systems, ADAS, digital cockpit, and entertainment, into a single standard PC – reducing cost, enabling faster development, and delivering cyber-secure OTA updates. DriveOS supports all propulsion systems – ICE, EV, and hybrid.
HyperSafety ‘sets new safety standard’
Drako’s HyperSafety defines a new multi-layered standard for automotive safety performance – delivering predictable real-time performance under all operating conditions.
- 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 analyzed to detect and prevent erroneous operation.
Powerful solutions accelerate OEM deployment
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: A full-featured, customizable cockpit 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 support.
- 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 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.
Solving a ‘major industry problem’
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 like 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.
Bringing hard real-time capabilities to Linux
Drako DriveOS brings hard real-time capabilities to Linux – finally cementing Linux as the holy grail for safety critical, cyber physical systems and eliminating the need for multi-ECU RTOS. The DriveOS platform enables developers to leverage the vast Linux ecosystem of libraries, applications, and tools – without kernel changes.
Key features
- 4x performance advantage: DriveOS delivers 108 microsecond end-to-end real-time performance versus 514 microseconds for TSN automotive Ethernet, maximizing control system responsiveness and safety.
- Industry’s first single-ECU capability: Drako DriveOS is the first platform to enable the complete consolidation of all functions (control systems, digital cockpit, ADAS) onto a single standard PC architecture, dramatically reducing hardware costs, complexity, and mass. DriveOS can be deployed today on existing multi-ECU or zonal architectures.
- Unified electronics architecture: DriveOS provides real-time networking, device control, and power delivery on simplified harness technology.
- Formally proven mixed-criticality and redundancy: The separation kernel provides hardware-backed isolation between subsystems. This is a crucial safety guarantee, ensuring that a fault or cyberattack in one subsystem cannot compromise safety-critical driving functions. Drako DriveOS supports configurable, low latency failover.
- Cyber-secure cloud integration: Drako DriveOS enables full cloud connectivity – real-time fleet management, remote diagnostics, and AI training – without creating attack paths into vehicle control systems, thereby solving the cybersecurity concerns. Drako’s hardware-enforced isolation enables manufacturers to deploy targeted over-the-air updates without risking system-wide failures or extensive revalidation cycles.
Dean Drako, CEO of Drako Tech, says: “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.”
