HW resource componentizing for smooth migration from single-function ECU to multi-function ECU

Abstract

The automotive design paradigm is shifting from the one-function on one (Electronic Control Unit) paradigm toward the on one ECU paradigm to reduce the ever increasing number of ECUs in a vehicle. In order to support such paradigm shift, this paper proposes a HW (hardware) resource componentizing technique that provides the illusion of a physically isolated component for each automotive SW (software) component even when a multi-function is actually shared by multiple concurrent SW components. With this technique, each SW component's physical properties such as timing behavior can be invariant with its surrounding SW components and hence the automaker can easily compose and verify a complex future automotive system. In order to effectively realize this HW resource componentizing, we propose anactive window based share provisioning that provides a HW share to a SW component only when it is active. This way, the capacity can be divided not only in the spatial (i.e., share) domain but also in the temporal domain, providing a large number of fine-granular HW components for serving a large number of SW components. The effectiveness of the proposed HW com-ponentizing technique is validated through both simulation and actual implementation with real automotive workload.