Low-Cost FPGA-Based Electronic Control Unit for Vehicle Control Systems

Abstract

The development of new control algorithms in vehicles requires high economic resources, mainly due to the use of generic real-time instrumentation and control systems. In this work, we proposed a low-cost electronic control unit (ECU) that could be used for both development and implementation. The proposed electronic system used a hybrid system on chip (SoC) between a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and an Advanced RISC (reduced instruction set computer) Machine (ARM) processor that allowed the execution of parallel tasks, fulfilling the real-time requirements that vehicle controls demand. Another feature of the proposed electronic system was the recording of measured data, allowing the performance of the implemented algorithm to be evaluated. All this was achieved by using modular programming that, without the need for a real-time operating system, executed the different tasks to be performed, exploiting the parallelism offered by the FPGA as well as the dual core of the ARM processor. This methodology facilitates the transition between the designing, testing, and implementation stages in the vehicle. In addition, our system is programmed with a single binary file that integrates the code of all processors as well as the hardware description of the FPGA, which speeds up the updating process. In order to validate and demonstrate the performance of the proposed electronic system as a tool for the development and implementation of control algorithms in vehicles, a series of tests was carried out on a test bench. Different traction control system (TCS) algorithms were implemented and the results were compared.

Interrupt Latency Accurate Measurement in Multiprocessing Embedded Systems by Means of a Dedicated Circuit

“…Several applications use interrupts to communicate between the PL and PS and combine hard real-time environments with soft real-time ones. In the automotive world, ECUs or autonomous driving are some examples [41,42]. Another example is audio or video stream data systems that usually work in real-time with an FIR filter in the PL [43].…”

A Nonlinear Circuit Analysis Technique for Time-Variant Inductor Systems

“…It is notable that the proposed approximated methods do require more hardware resources (adders and multipliers) to get the optimized computation efficiency than the Runge-Kutta method, especially if more higher order terms are desired to improve the accuracy. However, as the embedded computation platforms like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and portable General Purpose Graphic Processor Units (GPGPUs) are mushrooming, these additional costs become insignificant [36,37].…”

Implementation of Power-Efficient Control Unit on Ultra-scale FPGA for Green Communication

“…An electronic CU is designed by authors on FPGA for controlling the vehicles' system. The Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) Machine (ARM) processor is used along with FPGA for computing parallel tasks (Pérez et al, 2019). To promote the ideas of green communication researchers have implemented a power-efficient CU on Virtex and Spartan family's FPGA (Pandey, 2020).…”