Drako Tech Announces DriveOS™ HyperSafety: World's First Single-ECU Automotive Platform

Auto manufacturers worldwide can now build exceptionally safe, fully connected, AI-enhanced vehicles with massive cost savings

SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 16, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Drako Tech today announced DriveOS with HyperSafety™: the automotive industry's first single-ECU hard real-time automotive operating system.

The Drako DriveOS platform was launched in 2015 and has been battle-tested in Drako GTE and Drako Dragon high performance vehicles. It consolidates all vehicle subsystems, including control systems, ADAS, and digital cockpit, into a single standard PC – reducing cost, enabling faster development, and delivering cyber-secure OTA updates. DriveOS supports all propulsion systems – ICE, EV, and hybrid.

HyperSafety Sets New Safety Standard

Drako's HyperSafety defines a new multi-layered standard for automotive safety performance -- delivering predictable real-time performance under all operating conditions.

Ultra-safe driving responsiveness: Single-ECU architecture provides nanosecond-level control processing. DriveOS control and networking backbone delivers four times faster communication compared with multi-ECU TSN automotive Ethernet.
Continuous operation even if multiple components fail: The architecture deploys strict hardware isolation as well as hardware and software redundancy.
Cyber-secure connectivity: An order-of-magnitude smaller code footprint, secure hardware partitioning, and on-chip memory communication between virtual ECUs dramatically reduce attack surfaces and streamline safety validation and OTA updates.
AI guardrails: The entire communication flow is continuously analyzed to detect & prevent erroneous operation.

Powerful Solutions Accelerate OEM Deployment

Drako Tech provides systems, development environments, and reference designs that run natively on Drako DriveOS:

Control systems development environment: The Drako Design Environment enables control engineers to build high-performance vehicle control systems directly from Simulink models, preserving their existing tools and workflows.
Digital cockpit: Full-featured, customizable system ready to be branded and deployed, featuring high-resolution instrument cluster support, native navigation, advanced multimedia, vehicle & fleet management tools, and multi-display capabilities.
ADAS development environment: A unified software foundation for building advanced driver assistance systems with ultra-low latency control and support for industry-standard AI platforms.

Automotive Industry's Critical Challenge

The industry’s common multi-ECU architectures struggle with integration complexity – seats, doors, lights, active and passive safety, suspension, thermal management, sensors, cameras, radars, lidars and actuators that vary across vehicle models. Each requires separate ECUs, creating integration complexity and restricting reuse, resulting in higher costs and slower time-to-market.

Drako DriveOS Solves Major Industry Problem: Full Consolidation with Uncompromised Safety

The shift to single-ECU architectures has previously been hindered by two fundamental barriers: 1) how to run safety-critical control systems alongside non-critical systems like infotainment on the same ECU without interference, and 2) how to physically connect hundreds of diverse vehicle subsystems to a single compute unit.

Drako Tech is the first to solve both challenges - through a separation kernel that provides safety isolation and a unified electronics system that enables reliable, low latency connectivity across all vehicle domains.

Bringing Hard Real-Time Capabilities to Linux

Drako DriveOS brings hard real-time capabilities to Linux – finally cementing Linux as the holy grail for safety critical, cyber physical systems and eliminating the need for multi-ECU RTOS. The DriveOS platform enables developers to leverage the vast Linux ecosystem of libraries, applications, and tools – without kernel changes.

Drako DriveOS single-ECU automotive software platform

Key Features

4x performance advantage: DriveOS delivers 108 microsecond end-to-end real-time performance versus 514 microseconds for TSN automotive Ethernet, maximizing control system responsiveness and safety.
Industry's first single-ECU capability: Drako DriveOS is the first platform to enable the complete consolidation of all functions (control systems, digital cockpit, ADAS) onto a single standard PC architecture, dramatically reducing hardware costs, complexity, and mass. DriveOS can be deployed today on existing multi-ECU or zonal architectures.
Unified electronics architecture: DriveOS provides real-time networking, device control, and power delivery on simplified harness technology.
Formally proven mixed-criticality & redundancy: The separation kernel provides hardware-backed isolation between subsystems. This is a crucial safety guarantee, ensuring that a fault or cyberattack in one subsystem cannot compromise safety-critical driving functions. Drako DriveOS supports configurable, low latency failover.
Cyber-secure cloud integration: Drako DriveOS enables full cloud connectivity -- real-time fleet management, remote diagnostics, and AI training -- without creating attack paths into vehicle control systems, thereby solving the cybersecurity concerns. Drako’s hardware-enforced isolation enables manufacturers to deploy targeted over-the-air updates without risking system-wide failures or extensive revalidation cycles.

“Nearly half of the cost of new vehicles is tied up in software and electronics. Drako Tech now offers all OEMs worldwide – regardless of size or influence – a definitive leap in their ability to deliver exceptionally safe, connected, AI-enhanced vehicles, with massive cost advantages,” said Dean Drako, CEO of Drako Tech. "We are the first to achieve the ultimate goal – a single-ECU, hard real-time operating system and unified electronics architecture with mixed criticality – while providing OEMs a flexible deployment path."

For more information, please visit: https://drakotech.ai

About Drako Tech

Drako Tech delivers the fastest path to safe, connected, AI-powered vehicles through its industry-first single-ECU, mixed criticality, real-time automotive operating system. Drako DriveOS provides real-time networking, device control, and power delivery on simplified harness technology. The company's platform accelerates development and maximizes profitability for automotive OEMs across all vehicle segments. Founded by Silicon Valley technology pioneers, Drako Tech's solutions are battle-tested in the world's most demanding performance vehicles. For more information, visit www.drakotech.ai.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5bc1144a-4441-4e04-940a-bc83555ea050

Media Contact:
Gloria Nichols
LaunchM Inc
gloria@launchm.com

Drako DriveOS single-ECU automotive software platform

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