With IAA Mobility and the RISC-V Automotive Conference 2025 just around the corner, Ive pulled together the top themes from recent expert panels that every automotive leader should have on their LiDAR.
Aug. 05, 2025 –
“The car will change in the next five years more than the next fifty years”, said Peter Schiefer, President & CEO of the Automotive division at Infineon Technologies. “Traditional architectures are reaching their limit. That’s why RISC-V will be a game changer, enabling collaboration between hardware and software”, he said, speaking at Infineon’s Automotive RISC-V Ecosystem Summit 2025 in Munich last week.
As the world leader in automotive semiconductor technology, Infineon is far from alone in this belief. Across the global automotive ecosystem, leaders from chipmakers, OEMs, and software specialists are aligned: the car of the future is a software-defined compute platform in motion, and to build it we need to rethink the entire architecture from the ground up.
RISC-V International CEO Andrea Gallo recently partook in several high-profile panels focused on the path to building the car of tomorrow, today. From Munich, to the Automobil Elektronik Kongress (AEK) ‘Computing Architectures of the Future’ session in Ludwigsburg, to Paris for the ‘Accelerating Automotive Innovation with RISC-V’ panel at our own RISC-V Summit Europe, one key theme held steady: We must come together to shape the future of mobility with open standards and strong partnerships.
On September 9th, RISC-V International is hosting the RISC-V Automotive Conference 2025, adjacent to IAA Mobility in Munich. It’s an easy 5-minute walk from the main exhibition, making it simple to attend both events and stay at the heart of the automotive technology conversation.
Ahead of these events, I’ve identified 7 key priorities, shaped by leading voices across recent panels, that outline what it takes to build the car of tomorrow…
Future vehicles demand flexible platforms that can scale across compute domains and evolve rapidly with emerging technologies and user needs. From entry-level city cars to high-end autonomous fleets, we need compute platforms that support a wide range of performance, safety, and energy requirements.
“We’re moving from distributed software into zonal and central compute”, said Robert Moran, VP & GM, Automotive Processors at NXP, speaking in Ludwigsburg. This approach allows automakers to streamline development, optimize costs, and accelerate deployment by reusing platform components across vehicle lines.
Many modern vehicles on the road today are structured around domain-based architectures, employing domain controllers – dedicated ECUs that handle specific areas like powertrain, infotainment, body control, or ADAS. While effective, domain architectures lead to a proliferation of ECUs and wiring, which increases cost, weight, and system complexity.