Shifting Left with the Comprehensive Digital Twin with Doug Burcicki and Scot Morrison – Part 1 – Transcript
The Industry Forward Podcast recently featured a series of discussions focused on the concept of the “shift-left” and how it is supported by the comprehensive Digital Twin. In part one of a discussion with Doug Burcicki, Senior Director of Automotive and Heavy Equipment Industries for the Lifecycle Collaboration Software Product Team at Siemens Digital Industries Software and Scot Morrison, Vice President of Shift Left Software Product Management in the Hardware Assisted Verification group at Siemens EDA, Dale and I asked about the transition towards software defined products, promoting new collaboration among engineering and product teams, virtual testing and verification methods, and much more.
You can listen to the episode through the player, or read a transcript of the discussion below.
Conor Peick
Welcome, Doug and Scot, thanks so much for carving out some time to talk with Dale and I today. We’re really excited to have you guys on the show. I was hoping you could just start us off with a brief introduction for the listeners covering kind of your experiences in industry and some of the projects you’re working on today. Scot, maybe we can start with you?
Scot Morrison
Sure. I currently run the shift left software product management group for the hardware assisted verification business in Siemens EDA. Our team focuses on providing virtual platforms of SoCs, and also enabling system level digital twins. My background is in embedded software. For example, I ran product development at a real time operating system company for 10 years. And I also worked in a services company before that for over 10 years doing system modeling and control implementation projects for automotive and aerospace companies.
Conor Peick
Doug, how about yourself?
Doug Burcicki
Yeah. First, thanks for having me here today and inviting me to the podcast. It’s always good and fun and I enjoy participating in this, this project. So thanks for the opportunity. Yeah. My name is Doug Burcicki. I’m responsible for global business development for our automotive and heavy equipment industries in what we refer to as our lifecycle collaboration software. So. I’ve been with Siemens for about 7 years. Prior to that, I was in the automotive supply base, Tier 1, supporting global OEM’s. I’ve been around electrical systems for my entire career. So the EDS or the E?E architectures associated with them, and I joined Siemens about seven years ago because they were a mechanical company that moved into software and they started acquiring organizations and entities that enabled them to develop a very broad product that I thought was aligning very well with the changes in the industry that were afoot at the time and you know the I think we can all attest to the speed at which the industry is changing the auto industry, not just the auto, but I’m focused on auto as we as I said.
But it’s been a fun ride. It’s been really exciting to see the changes at the pace that they’re taking and how Siemens is evolving and working together with our customers and partners to enable these vehicles, these SDVs or software-defined products that we’ll be talking about today because in my opinion, that’s probably the single most compelling and impactful trend in the auto industry today.
Dale Tutt
Oh, welcome, guys, and thank you again for the introduction and I’m super excited to have you guys here today talking with us and I’m really excited about the topic that we’re going to be talking about and you guys have both touched on a little bit about first shifting left, how do you move more of that design activity and engineering activity and software development to the left in your product development cycle so that you go faster. But also then you know, Doug, you led into this you know with software-defined products we, this is an exciting time for us in a lot of industries. Where we’re really seeing a paradigm shift in these, in, in how these cars are not only developed but how they use software to enable new features and provide functionality and really to be able to, you know, add more functionality over the future of the car. It’s no longer do you have to just go buy a new car now you can always just get that next software download and get a little more features.
So with when we talk about software defined products becoming a norm in automotive and many other industries, by the way, it’s aerospace, heavy equipment, we’re seeing it everywhere, consumer electronics. Next, what are the impacts or challenges that each of you are seeing in these industries and the customers that you interact with as they adapt to this new paradigm and what are you, what are you guys seeing? I’ll start with you, Scot.
Scot Morrison
Yeah, I mean, it is a paradigm shift, as you said for our customers. You know, I think they have been moving towards kind of the software defined aspect of the vehicle for years now, because we’ve just seen more and more ECU’s or LRU’s, and we’ve seen larger and larger software workloads. And you know what they found is that kind of the classical kind of siloed development process that they had was not really, you know, allowing them to build the scale that they need in terms of the overall software and the system level. Complexity. So there’s been a migration or an evolution, if you will, towards that. What really I think is kind of driving things to kind of a next level of challenge right now is the kind of really very advanced graphics and AI and ML workloads that people are dealing with, you know, and there are other factors as well, people. Moving away from simplified kind of real time operating systems. To maybe Linux or even Android based general purpose operating systems that drives up, you know, the source line of code counts significantly. So all these different trends are driving more and more software, kind of it’s the accelerating part of the design and this kind of evolution is hitting a bit of a wall in many cases.
And what they’re finding is that they have to move to. Some term that we’ve heard for many, many years now, most of my career people have talked about hardware, software, code design, but it’s the reality today that people have to embrace. And you know the hardware can’t be done, you know, just kind of based on the last design and just to add a little bit more memory and functionality, a little bit higher processing speed is really the hardware in many cases has to be optimized towards support of a specific software load, you know or at least a class of problems you know for. You know, might be for advanced graphics or for AI reasoning or for other types of things, and of course safety drives into that as well. Then you get completely optimized silicon architectures and structures for safety applications. So then people have then had to move recently towards the, you know, the ability to have a digital twin virtual platform of their hardware that then they can modify that and optimize that in conjunction with the development of the software workload.
That’s the challenge we’re seeing right now. So moving away from the more sequential to the parallel design and you know the solutions that the customer is demanding and that we’re developing. Enabled them to do that and shift, you know, kind of that last mile now towards the process that can deal with the, the complexity, that’s the reality for them these. Yes.
Conor Peick
Doug do you have any thoughts on that?
Doug Burcicki
Yeah, yeah, I got several thoughts. I mean, Scot touched upon a lot of technical challenges, but I think one thing I went through my head is why is a company even doing that, right? Why are they addressing these issues or taking on these modified? Methodologies to develop their product, and there’s a lot of different answers, but the motivating factor is their business models are evolving, right? They these customers are our customers. These OEM’s historically have sold cars. They generate profit on each vehicle they sell and they try to sell as many as they can. And you know that’s been the business model. But now they’re talking about extending the life cycle of vehicles or what I should say is the revenue generation capability of vehicles. For, you know, a decade or more after that vehicle was sold, and that’s all done via software. They need new architectures and able to do this.
So they’re all going through an evolution of existing architecture improvements and in some cases they have greenfield approaches towards brand new architectures that enable a software defined product to be a reality. No companies there yet, they’re on a journey, they’re starting the process or an evolution that’s going to take time. It’s being done in response to heavy competition in the market and quite honestly, without a response to a software defined product, you become. And on competitive entity, attractive product is what you’re generating or producing and you’ll lose market share. We all know that as I I again, I’m centric on automotive and heavy equipment, but very competitive and fast moving over the last 15 years or so. We went through a an upsurge where globally. There were literally hundreds of new OEM’s trying to enter the automotive market. Now we’re going through a phase of consolidation where we’ve seen literally hundreds of them go by the wayside in the last several years.
And you know the ones that are surviving and still out there are strong and they’re starting to think global and moving overseas. So very competitive landscape and it’s not an easy ask to ask a, an OEM to turn into a software defined product making entity when they’ve been thinking about mechanical challenges. For the better part of 100 years, and again, you know I mentioned before, some of these startups, you know, they don’t have the complexity in their portfolios, they don’t have the legacy, they don’t have the siloed organizations and they’re able to move very nimbly and. Quick so the legacy OEM’s need to change things and do things differently, and I think that’s where their biggest challenges are. I mean, the technical challenges are there and they have to plow through those.
But I think that before they can even you know, the rubber hits the road there and they’re really moving forward with a lot of momentum, they need organizational recalibration. They need to bring in new skill sets that they didn’t prioritize in the past and I see that’s where most of these the companies that are trying to make this transition or this leap are having the biggest challenges and you know, putting the most effort in into enabling organizations to move forward because as Scot said before, you got these parallel activities going on, people use the term decouple separating. Hardware and software development timelines here, which makes sense given the pace that these programs are moving, but they can’t be done without deep, deep integration being taken into account every step of the process. So it’s a it’s a tough ask. As I said before, there’s no company out there that’s doing it all yet, and I don’t think there’s a company out there that has the ability to do it all on their own. Honestly, I think it takes a, a group of partners that have certain skill sets to make it a reality. So yeah, there’s many challenges, technical and business wise. That these companies are struggling with and it’s not easy, but it is part of the reason why it is so exciting to be in the auto industry right now.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
