Driving the Future of Mobility: New Virtual Prototypes for Arm Zena CSS and SOAFEE Workflows with Synopsys Virtualizer Native Execution

The automotive industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Vehicles are evolving into intelligent, connected, and continuously improving systems, creating new opportunities for differentiation and revenue. At the same time, automakers, Tier 1 suppliers, and semiconductor partners face a common challenge: how to deliver sophisticated software on increasingly complex hardware - faster and at scale.

The automotive semiconductor market is projected to exceed $80 billion by the end of the decade, driven by AI-enabled features like advanced driver assistance, immersive infotainment, and predictive maintenance. But rising software complexity, tighter timelines, and cost pressures demand a new approach to engineering - one that accelerates development while reducing risk.

At CES 2026, Synopsys announced a new Virtualizer™ Development Kit (VDK) including SOAFEE workflows for Arm® Zena™ Compute Subsystems (CSS) to accelerate reliable virtual silicon and software development for automotive engineering teams. Arm Zena CSS delivers a standardized, safety-capable compute platform for automotive workloads, powering everything from IVI and ADAS to central compute. Zena CSS pre-integrates Arm Automotive Enhanced technology like  Cortex®-A720AE and Cortex-R82AE, serving as a launchpad for differentiation through custom IP, AI accelerators, and system-level integration. This foundation accelerates silicon development and enables software teams to start early, reducing risk and time to market.

“The rise of Physical AI is driving new demands on how complex systems are designed, developed, and validated, especially in vehicles as they become increasingly AI-defined. By leveraging Synopsys’ Virtualizer Development Kit,  automotive teams can begin software development on Arm Zena CSS before physical silicon is available, accelerating innovation and delivering the next generation of mobility faster, more efficiently, and safely.” Suraj Gajendra, vice president of products and solutions, Physical AI Business Unit, Arm

Synopsys is empowering the automotive ecosystem to develop next-generation software and hardware through a new, comprehensive VDK for Zena CSS. Synopsys’ VDK for Zena CSS enables development teams to immediately begin building, integrating, and validating systems based on the Zena CSS platform, whether in the cloud or on-prem. The new VDK provides a complete, software-ready virtual platform that accurately models Arm’s latest automotive compute subsystem. With this kit developers can:

• Start Software Development Earlier: “Shift left” workflows become reality, as teams bring up operating systems, drivers, and application stacks months ahead of silicon availability
• Accelerate Debug and Integration: Advanced debug, trace, and analysis features, allow rapid identification and resolution of issues in complex software stacks, including hypervisors and container orchestration layers.
• Enable Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Seamless integration into modern DevOps workflows supports automated testing, validation, and regression analysis.
• Facilitate Collaboration Across the Supply Chain: Virtual platforms can be securely distributed to OEMs, Tier-1s, and semiconductor partners, ensuring all stakeholders work with a consistent, production-aligned target.
• Support Realistic, High-Performance Execution: Leveraging Synopsys Virtualizer Native Execution (VNE), the VDK delivers silicon-like performance for CPU-centric workloads, enabling fast iterations for validation with application workloads.

Synopsys VDKs are designed with extendibility at their core, enabling teams to scale from subsystem to full SoC and system-level validation. This includes the industry’s broadest virtual model library, integration of industry-standard models into VNE, and the largest electronic control unit (ECU) model library for building full vehicle environments.

Synopsys also co-leads the SIL Kit open standard with Vector, ensuring seamless connectivity between ECUs, environment simulators, and test frameworks. With over 15 years of leadership in virtual prototyping, Synopsys pioneered the secure distribution of virtual platforms across the automotive supply chain.

When projects move toward tape-out, Synopsys VDKs extend seamlessly into hybrid emulation with Synopsys ZeBu® and HAPS®, enabling comprehensive performance, power, and safety validation. This continuity across development cycles ensures software teams always work with realistic, production-aligned targets, maintaining CI/CD pipelines and supporting incremental updates from concept through silicon towards post-silicon. 

With the new VDK, Synopsys is demonstrating how automotive teams can validate autonomous driving stacks and mixed-criticality workloads early. This is done by leveraging Arm Zena CSS virtual platforms powered by Synopsys Virtualizer with VNE on Arm hardware.

The solution runs OpenAD Kit -  the first SOAFEE blueprint for autonomy -  in a containerized environment on Zena CSS. This illustrates the SOAFEE vision: moving development into the cloud, where teams compile with production tool chains, then add a virtual SoC model to develop real software in mixed-criticality setups. This approach scales to complex systems with multiple ECUs and full vehicle environments. A complete virtual platform ensures binary compatibility, enabling multi-vendor integration and CI/CD pipelines that remain active even post-silicon - supporting continuous updates throughout the car’s lifecycle.

By modeling Arm Cortex-A720AE for high-performance compute and Cortex-R82AE for real-time safety, Synopsys provides a deterministic, timing-accurate platform for orchestration across criticality levels. Developers use standardized SOAFEE APIs, containerization, and orchestration to build reusable architectures where the same container structure later runs on the vehicle, enabling seamless digital twinning between cloud and edge.

The VDK for Zena CSS supports the following:

• Mixed-Criticality Scenarios: Demonstrating central compute communicating with zonal nodes in a mixed-criticality configuration within the VDK for Arm Zena CSS.
• Multi-Abstraction Simulation: Combining multiple ECUs into a full-vehicle simulation environment—demonstrated using Synopsys Silver™ to co-simulate a control ECU with the VDK for Arm Zena CSS
• Hypervisor and Multi-OS Support: Running Linux and Android guest OS on Zena central compute with hypervisor support and near real-time performance via VNE technology.
• Cloud-Ready CI/CD Integration: Complex multi-ECU, multi-abstraction scenarios deployed in the cloud and integrated with DevOps tools like AWS CodePipeline for continuous integration and testing.
• Automated Test Management: Synopsys TPT streamlines test requirements, definitions, execution, and results analysis for efficient validation workflows.

The new Synopsys VDK for Zena CSS provides a blueprint for “shift left” automotive silicon and software development, SOAFEE-aligned workflows, and realistic targets that ensure validated software behaves as expected on silicon to reduce development costs, lower risk to production, and accelerate time to market and innovation for our customers.

Explore Synopsys’ VDK for Zena CSS and see how Synopsys can accelerate your SDV roadmap - from early autonomy validation to full system integration and tape-out readiness. 

Demonstrations of the new Synopsys VDK are available by request during CES.  Please contact: https://www.synopsys.com/events/ces.html. For more information about the Synopsys VDK for Zena CSS and Synopsys VNE contact Synopsys.