Virtual Development of Engine ECU by Modeling Technology

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Along with the evolution of vehicle electronic systems from domain-specific control to the integrated control of the entire vehicle system, ECU systems have become increasingly complicated and large-scale. This has made it difficult to set out an optimal architecture of the ECU system efficiently at the early planning stages. As well, the conventional ECU development methodology is also becoming difficult to achieve the increasingly strict requirements for safety design based on multi-ECU systems. Conventionally, optimizing electronic systems requires fabricating many prototypes and evaluating them repeatedly, but with their increasing scale, this method has become impractical. We therefore believe virtual development is a required step. Although functional-level simulators and implementation-level simulators are being used currently, these are both separate and independent. Because of this, it is necessary to introduce virtual development as a new physical-level development environment to connect functional-level and implementation-level. In terms of not only function but also safety design, virtual development has the ability to inject failures that are difficult to recreate in an actual device. Therefore we have started introducing the virtual development of ECU systems by using system level modeling and simulation technology with SystemC language which provides the concept of time. In the phase of physical-level design, because a virtual ECU system is developed by designing each functional model of system such as ADC and drive circuit and connecting these models as a system, the behavior of the whole ECU system can be verified easily without having actual devices. Therefore the optimized structure of ECU, such as microcomputer, software and peripheral LSI, can be determined efficiently at the early stages of ECU development. Safety design can also be achieved efficiently because the data transferred in the system can be changed to failure data forcibly by covering functional models with failure models. We believe that maximizing the performance of ECUs in electronic systems, and ensuring that these systems meet safety design requirements will require methods to visualize things that are difficult to visualize, and that this visualization is needed both before and after manufacturing. Virtual development of ECU systems by using system level modeling and simulation technology with SystemC language provides a useful method to achieve these requirements.