Industry Expert Blogs

With 500 million lines of code inside modern vehicles—and the 1 billion mark not too far off—the age of software-driven vehicles is very much here. As challenging as hardware development is, software development can be even more difficult and time-consuming. Thankfully, digital twins—virtual models or representations of systems under development—have emerged to dramatically reduce the soaring cost of verifying and validating software-defined products.

Valued at $12.9 billion in 2022, the digital twins market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 35% to 40% through 2030, according to industry analysts. Increasing adoption of enabling technologies such as AI, enterprise internet of things (IoT) platforms, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) are driving the market growth. In addition, advancements in technologies such as modeling, simulation, and visualization software integrated with digital twins capabilities are anticipated to further spur growth in this area.

A small but rapidly growing segment of this market is electronics digital twins, consisting of digital replicas of an electronics system: hardware, software, and its environment. Used throughout the product lifecycle, electronics digital twins accelerate software and system development, verification, and test through a broad range of uses cases. Example use cases include software bring-up; hardware/software validation; power and performance analysis; functional safety; software, security, and system validation and testing; and functional safety and security testing. To address the needs of the automotive industry’s move towards software-defined vehicles, Synopsys has developed its electronics digital twin solution for this sector. To this end, Synopsys has acquired PikeTec Software Engineering, a Berlin, Germany-based company that develops solutions for the automated testing and integration of automotive software. For more details about the newest member of the Synopsys family, we chatted with Tom De Schutter, vice president of product management and system solutions in the Synopsys Systems Design Group.

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