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Automotive Applications

Automotive Embedded Systems Software Benefits from Virtual System Prototyping

Automotive design has grown to include the design of electronic control units (ECUs) in addition to the mechanical design. This industry is challenged by an increasing need to reduce design cycle times and cost while satisfying global regulations on passenger safety, emissions and fuel economy. The embedded software component of ECU design continues to grow even faster than the hardware, and automotive electronic companies are experiencing high growth in their ranks of software engineers. Automotive software and hardware are focused on reliability and quality, both for safety-critical functionality where errors can be life threatening and for other subsystems where reliability is important to control warranty costs.

Automotive manufacturers use VaST's virtual system prototypes as a specification communication medium and for architectural development and evaluation, while Tier 1 automotive suppliers focus on using VaST VSPs for embedded software development.

VaST VSP's facilitate quantitative architectural analysis and evaluation. Increasingly, automotive electronics development starts with formal models defined using MATLAB/Simulink® and universal modeling language (UML). These models are used to evaluate candidate architectures for networked ECUs and to investigate the performance required for each ECU and the network traffic that the ECU partition generates. Using VaST technology a virtual system prototype can be created for each ECU including specific processor, cache size, clock rate and peripheral set. This virtual system prototype becomes the scaffold for the development of the ECU software and provides developers with greater visibility into operation and performance than can be obtained with a bench setup and actual hardware.

The virtual system prototype technology enables quantitative analysis of ECU design candidates. MATLAB/Simulink and UML models can be linked into networks to perform a simulation at an abstract level. As refinements are added in the form of architectures for ECUs and protocols for networks, the entire analysis can be repeated at an increasingly detailed level. At the lowest level, software development on a virtual system prototype of an ECU (or a subsystem of networked ECUs) provides very high levels of error checking and visibility into the internals of the hardware design.

Learn more about embedded systems design in consumer applications.

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