Drako Platform Architecture

Unified. Real-time. Scalable.

Drako DriveOS™ unifies control across all vehicle domains—from powertrain to cockpit to ADAS & AI — on a single ECU high-performance electrical/electronics vehicle architecture.

It eliminates the overhead of fragmented stacks, enabling faster integration, fewer ECUs, and dramatically shorter development cycles.

Proven in luxury performance vehicles — it’s engineered to streamline your next vehicle & fleet development, while delivering hard real-time predictability.

Proven Single-ECU Vehicle Architecture for Faster, Lower Cost Development

Single ECU automotive architecture

Unified Electronics & Software Operating System

Drako DriveOS is a unified electrical/electronics architecture, networking, and vehicle operating system that consolidates all core functions—across powertrain, ADAS & AI, infotainment, and more—onto a single platform.

The single ECU vehicle architecture directly manages compute, memory, I/O, and timing for all domains from the kernel up, eliminating the need for multiple RTOS instances, middleware layers, or isolated ECUs.

All applications run side-by-side on the same multicore processor, fully isolated through hardware-enforced partitioning and scheduled with nanosecond-level determinism. There’s no reliance on traditional virtualization or hypervisors that introduce shared failure paths or unpredictable latency. Subsystems can be independently certified, updated, and deployed—simplifying development while improving system safety and maintainability.

Easy, Flexible Application Integration

OEM and third-party applications can be easily ported into DriveOS with minimal adaptation—no hypervisors, wrappers, or extensive rework required.

This architecture has been validated in Drako’s high-performance vehicles—and now enables faster, lower-cost development for OEMs bringing new platforms to market.

Once aligned with DriveOS APIs and execution model, ported modules run with the same real-time precision as Drako’s solution suite, including nanosecond-level scheduling and deterministic I/O.

Real-Time USB Stack — One Cable for Unified Networking, Device Control, Power Delivery

DriveOS extends its unified architecture into the communication layer by replacing fragmented vehicle networks—such as CAN, Ethernet, and FlexRay—with a single, real-time USB software stack. All domains and modules communicate over the same protocol and timing model, eliminating the need for bridging logic, gateway ECUs, or clock synchronization.

This approach simplifies hardware design and accelerates software integration. The result is faster module onboarding, lower integration cost, and a streamlined data path from sensor to compute to actuator.

DriveOS supports USB 2, 3.x and 4 protocols, enabling deterministic data transfers with 180 µs latency and nanosecond-level jitter.

Time slots and bandwidth are dynamically allocated based on real-time priorities, ensuring that critical control data—such as torque commands or vision output—gets through exactly when it’s needed.

Developers work with one communication stack across the entire vehicle, reducing the number of drivers, timing models, and interfaces they must validate.

Unified USB stack

Single USB stack eliminates automotive Ethernet complexity

DriveOS’s real-time USB stack delivers deterministic vehicle communication without the infrastructure overhead of automotive Ethernet.

DriveOS’s USB approach eliminates coordination layers. Critical control data is prioritized through the real-time USB stack, with deterministic scheduling built into the platform. Developers work with one protocol stack, one timing model, and one validation framework. There’s no clock synchronization to configure, no traffic shapers to program, no multi-device timing analysis.

DriveOS provides this deterministic behavior through a unified USB software stack with sub-500µs latency and nanosecond-level jitter.

In contrast, industry real-time Ethernet approaches such as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) require synchronized clocks across all network devices, traffic scheduling through specialized hardware, and complex network configuration to achieve bounded latency.

These automotive Ethernet implementations demand extensive coordination. Time-aware shapers must schedule when critical traffic can transmit, frame preemption must interrupt lower-priority data, and specialized hardware must manage queue timing. Network engineers must configure scheduling tables, validate timing across all traffic patterns, and reconfigure system-wide parameters when requirements change. Implementation costs remain high—particularly for wiring harnesses and specialized switches.

Digital harness — Plug-and-play extensibility throughout the vehicle lifecycle

Drako’s digital harness technology, DigiHarness™, builds on the single USB cable backbone, replacing ECUs with virtual ECUs and plug-and-play physical interfaces. The extensibility lets manufacturers connect new devices without requiring any rewiring.

This plug-and-play architecture enables manufacturers to use one core harness across their product line and add modules as needed — using USB hubs for power, device control, and networking.

DigiHarness eliminates the constraints, complexity, and costs of fixed pin architectures, allowing OEMs to easily update their vehicles throughout the product lifecycle.

Traditional wiring harnesses lock manufacturers into fixed pin counts early in development.

Every control point must be defined upfront and wired individually. Adding functionality later becomes costly or infeasible, forcing manufacturers into rigid product cycles with limited mid-life updates.

Real-Time, Predictable Performance Without Engineering Overhead

DriveOS delivers the speed and predictability needed for ADAS and AI, chassis control, and autonomy workloads—without relying on virtualization layers that can introduce timing variability or require complex mitigation to maintain timing and isolation.

Because the system behaves the same way every time, engineers don’t need to fine-tune latency paths or debug erratic performance. DriveOS supports high-end real-time workloads on shared hardware—with the simplicity and predictability smaller OEM teams need to move quickly.

At its core is a deterministic, statically partitioned separation kernel that schedules tasks with fixed timing and near-zero virtualization overhead.

Domains have pre-allocated compute, memory, and I/O resources, so tasks execute predictably even under full system load.

There’s no need for runtime arbitration or best-effort scheduling. Critical signals like torque output or vision-frame results can be prioritized deterministically — executing exactly when needed without queuing delays or interference from lower-priority tasks.

Architectural Isolation for Mixed-Criticality & Fault Recovery

Single-ECU vehicle architecture isolation

Vehicles contain both safety-critical and non-critical functions. DriveOS enforces domain-level isolation, so faults in infotainment, AI, or OTA modules remain contained and cannot impact critical control systems.

Because isolation is enforced at the architectural level, OEMs can target safety validation where it matters most—without having to recertify the entire software stack. This means new features or software updates can be rolled out quickly, without triggering revalidation of already-certified safety domains—cutting integration time from months to weeks.

The Drako single-ECU vehicle architecture delivers the isolation foundation required for functional safety, while enabling rapid, fault-tolerant behavior across all domains.

Each domain runs independently with no shared failure paths.

Critical processes checkpoint their state at defined intervals, and if a fault is detected, DriveOS restores the affected domain from a verified-good replica—no reboot required. This allows continuous operation, even while recovery executes in the background.

Runs on a Multicore PC — No Custom Silicon, No Vendor Lock-In

Drako DriveOS runs all vehicle domains—from safety-critical control to infotainment—on an off-the-shelf multicore processor. There’s no need for custom automotive silicon or domain-specific ECUs. This reduces component costs, simplifies the supply chain, and gives OEMs freedom to source hardware from multiple vendors.

By consolidating functionality on standard multicore hardware, DriveOS helps OEMs move faster, cut integration time, and scale their platforms without vendor lock-in or hardware redesigns.

This approach has been validated in advanced, production supercars. The same class of commercial off-the-shelf hardware has also been adopted in avionics, where fault isolation and deterministic behavior are critical. These real-world deployments demonstrate that safety, performance, and cost efficiency can coexist—without requiring custom silicon.

The architecture delivers hard real-time performance and fault isolation entirely through software, so safety isn’t tied to specialized chips.

Domains are isolated at the hardware level and can be independently validated—supporting mixed-criticality workloads without full-stack recertification.

Hardware-Level Security Built into Single ECU Vehicle Architecture

Security is a growing concern for connected and software-defined vehicles. Many systems rely on layered software defenses—like access controls, hypervisors, or runtime firewalls—but these often share hardware resources, making them vulnerable to timing-based or cache-based side-channel attacks.

This secure-by-design architecture resists microarchitectural attacks without runtime patching, making it ideal for vehicles that support OTA updates, connected services, and mixed workloads on shared hardware.

DriveOS avoids this exposure by eliminating shared microarchitectural elements such as speculative execution paths, shared caches, and global interrupt handling.

For example, a compromised infotainment module might infer data from another process by measuring memory access patterns.

Each domain runs on partitioned CPU cores with dedicated memory regions, cache slices, and I/O channels. Scheduling is deterministic, and interrupts are handled locally – ensuring untrusted code can’t interfere with critical functions. DriveOS enforces isolation through both policy and hardware, with no shared execution paths.

Safety-Critical Architecture: ASIL D-Ready

DriveOS HyperSafety is architected to meet ASIL D—the highest safety classification under ISO 26262.

The architecture supports independent certification of individual domains, allowing OEMs to achieve ASIL D compliance for safety-critical subsystems while running lower-criticality functions on the same hardware. Integration time can be reduced from months to weeks because changes to non-safety-critical domains don’t trigger revalidation of already-certified safety functions.

At its core is a formally provable separation kernel that provides mathematically verified isolation between domains.

This ensures faults or security breaches in one subsystem cannot propagate to safety-critical functions like powertrain control, braking, or steering.

DriveOS’s security architecture reinforces its safety capability by eliminating vulnerability to microarchitectural attacks. Each partition operates on dedicated cache slices, I/O channels, and processing cores with no shared execution paths—making it mathematically impossible for untrusted code to interfere with safety-critical functions.

The platform integrates advanced processor security technologies developed through DARPA research programs, including hardware-enforced memory protection and control-flow integrity.

Safety-critical domains maintain checkpointed state at defined intervals, enabling the system to restore affected subsystems from verified-good replicas without full reboots—maintaining continuous operation during fault recovery.

OEM Payoff: What the Drako Platform Architecture Enables

Drako’s platform architecture gives OEMs a clean path to modernize vehicle systems without adding safety or security risk. By unifying control, autonomy, and infotainment on a single software stack, the electrical/electronics architecture eliminates legacy gateway logic and simplifies domain integration.

This translates to reduced wiring complexity, lower BOM costs, and easier servicing. OEMs can integrate Drako’s solutions for:

The same foundation proven in ultra-high-performance vehicles now scales efficiently to cost-sensitive platforms—offering real-time precision, proven security isolation, and modular safety validation in a single design-ready platform.

OEMs can also easily port their own applications to run within isolated DriveOS domains — retaining real-time behavior and safety guarantees.

Each application, whether ported or native, shares the same underlying platform services without introducing shared failure paths or timing unpredictability.