System-On-a-Chip design of electronic control unit for car body control

Abstract

Increasing demand for dynamically controlled safety features, passenger comfort, and operational convenience in automobiles requires an intensive use of electronic control units. This paper presents an efficient System-On-a-Chip implementation of the electronic control unit (ECU) for car body control. The ECU includes a CPU and basic functions like SRAM and clock generator. With the flexibility of an FPGA, the ECU can be adopted to any available bus like CAN, LIN, FlexRay or a proprietary bus without changing the system architecture and adding additional external components. To improve the individual response time and to escape from some eventual trapped-function loops, High/Low ports of the ECU are simply used, which increases the stability of the actuator modules. A soft processor core optimised for FPGA is used as system controller and also as host controller for CAN. The proposed implementation has been developed by using the hardware description language, and has been synthesized placed and routed in an Altera FPGA device. Using FPGA, cost of the new ECU can be kept low, making the new car body control system affordable for customers and thus improving operational convenience.