The Dispatch: Week 42
Open SDV goes hackathon hands-on, Sibros appoints new Chief Customer Officer and platform teams chase reliable OTA at scale.
SDV Insider — October 17, 2025
Happy Friday! As Diwali week kicks off for millions of people worldwide, we’re seeing some bright sparks in the SDV world too—open platforms maturing, architectures consolidating, and a little chip drama to keep things lively. Let’s get into it. ✨
🚀 Top Story
Eclipse SDV Hackathon: from slideware to clone-and-build
A dual-site, 100+ engineer, working code hackathon focused on SDV sounds pretty cool. That’s exactly what came of the Eclipse SDV Hackathon where the finalists showed real patterns for orchestration, OTA safety, and data movement—think Ankaios (orchestration), Kuksa (vehicle data), Zenoh (pub/sub), uProtocol (service mesh), plus end-to-end OTA demos like COOTA (canary rollouts + telemetry). This event proves you can stand up a credible “plumbing” layer faster, then focus your team on features customers actually feel.
🔗 Meet the finalists & winners
Our take: The most impressive part wasn’t the features—it was the speed. In just 2.5 days, teams stitched together full SDV workflows (OTA pipelines, orchestration, data routing) using reusable building blocks and cloud-style rollout patterns instead of reinventing from scratch. While these may be far from production ready, it’s a clear signal that SDV is finally becoming modular and composable—and that the teams who win won’t be the ones rebuilding the plumbing, but the ones who reuse the platform layers and focus their energy on real differentiation (UX, ADAS, energy, services).
📈 Industry Pulse
Chip risk, still real: Automakers are securing supply as China-related risks reheat. SDV roadmaps still hinge on “boring” silicon arriving on time—dust off those multi-sourcing playbooks.
Security: supply chain is still the soft spot: Renault warned UK customers after a third-party data processor was hacked, exposing personal details including VINs and vehicle registrations. Renault’s own systems were untouched—but the breach highlights that the real risk isn’t always in-vehicle software, it’s the data ecosystem around the vehicle. In an SDV world built on OTA, cloud, and partner APIs, securing vendors is now just as critical as securing the vehicle itself.
🤖 Tech & Innovation Spotlight
Robotaxi R&D (rumor mill): Media outlet 36Kr reports that NVIDIA is exploring an internal robotaxi program—consistent with its “sell the shovels and mine some gold” approach across silicon, training, and AV stacks.
Power electronics for SDV compute: Infineon rolled out AEC-Q101 qualified 100V GaN transistors designed specifically for automotive power stages. Why this matters for SDV: as OEMs consolidate multiple ECUs into centralized or zonal compute, power rails must handle higher loads, faster switching, and tighter thermal envelopes. GaN (gallium nitride) enables smaller, more efficient, higher-frequency power conversion than traditional silicon—meaning you can feed high-performance domain controllers and AI/ADAS compute without oversized hardware or heat issues.
Infineon’s 100V CoolGaN™ Automotive Transistor G1 family
🧭 Company Moves
Sibros appoints a CCO: Vijay Sharma steps in as Chief Customer Officer to scale deployments and outcomes for the company’s rapidly expanding SDV programs for global OEM customers—timely as fleets shift from pilots to platform rollouts.
Vijay Sharma, Chief Customer Officer - Sibros Awards watch: Nexteer grabs “Automotive Software Solution of the Year” at AutoTech Breakthrough for it’s MotionIQ software suite for advanced chassis control and monitoring.
👀 What We’re Reading
Connectivity - SDV delays are creating a “telco” moment: A new BlackBerry QNX developer report “Under the Hood - The SDV Developer Report” says UK SDV progress is slowing under regulatory overload (think cybersecurity, GDPR and OTA system compliance), recalls, and integration bottlenecks, and teams are now looking outward for help. The twist: telcos are emerging as the solution, offering secure connectivity, private 5G, and data infrastructure to handle OTA, compliance, and V2X. In other words — when OEMs can’t move fast enough, network providers become SDV accelerators.
Virtualization is becoming the SDV backbone: Great deep-dive on why OEMs are moving to virtual ECUs and electronics digital twins to replace slow hardware testing. Virtualization enables parallel development, CI/CD, earlier supplier integration, and OTA-ready validation—turning 10–20 week cycles into days. In short: it’s the architecture that makes SDV development scalable.
SDV market sizing snapshot: We seem to run into lots these SDV market sizing reports. Here’s a new one signaling an SDV market growth forecast to reach $1.9T by 2034 (methodology caveats apply, but useful for board slides).
👋 That’s a Wrap
Open SDV is removing friction from the plumbing so teams can focus on what drivers feel. Keep watching supplier security posture, and your virtualization toolchain—those three decide how fast you can safely ship. Got scoops or wins? Reply here or ping editor@sdvinsider.com. See you next week. 🚗💨
— The SDV Insider Crew 🚗
The GaN transition for automotive power electonics makes a lot of sense when you think about the thermal challanges with centralized compute. Those domain controllers are pushing way more power than traditional ECUs, and the switching efficency gains from GaN really add up. Wonder how long before we see this become standard across the indutry though, qualification cycles for automotive are brutal.