Auto parts maker locks in edge-to-cloud portfolio
Dublin, Ireland-based Aptiv PLC on Tuesday announced an agreement to acquire Wind River from TPG Capital for US$4.3 billion in cash. Aptiv is the successor to Delphi Automotive PLC. The company designs and manufactures vehicle components. Wind River will continue to operate as a stand-alone business unit under Aptiv’s Advanced Safety & User Experience segment.
Aptiv makes autonomous mobility products, signal and power solutions and other systems used in vehicles. Or, as it explains, “Aptiv’s unique position as the only provider of the brain (software and compute) and nervous system (power and data distribution) is allowing us to conceive, specify and deliver the advanced vehicle architectures of the future.”
Wind River Studio is a cloud-native platform used to deploy and manage mission-critical intelligent edge systems. Wind River’s customers include telecom, aerospace & defense, automotive, industrial and medical.
Data is driving vehicle design and operations, said Kevin Clark, Aptiv’s president and CEO. That’s causing the largest transformation of the auto industry in a century, he added.
“With Aptiv and Wind River’s synergistic technologies and decades of experience delivering safety-critical systems, we will accelerate this journey to a software-defined future of the automotive industry. In addition, we are committed to further strengthening Wind River’s competitive position in the multiple industries it serves,” said Clark.
Wind River/Smart Vehicle Architecture integration planned
The auto parts maker said that one of its first orders of business is to integrate Wind River Studio with its own Smart Vehicle Architecture (SVA). SVA is the company’s play to establish a standards-based approach to future automotive systems designs built around software-defined vehicle platforms.
Aptiv offers a soup-to-nuts Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) comprising SVA designs, its software stack, advanced sensor suite which draws on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and other elements.
This past August, Wind River and Intel announced a joint development to use Intel’s Flex RAN reference software to develop a 5G vRAN solution built using Wind River Studio. The goal is to create “review evaluation packages” for operators to use to trial and deploy vRAN faster.
In 2020, Verizon claimed to complete to the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized 5G data session. Wind River, Intel and Samsung were partners. Wind River provided Verizon with a cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based software infrastructure that delivers ultra-low latency and high availability for national deployment of virtualized 5G RAN.
