Development of Embedded Automotive Electronics at Architectural/performance Level

During research on solving multidisciplinary problems in flight control design [1], functional level design tools like Ctrl-C®, MatriX® and later Matlab® were developed. These generic tools permitted to easily combine models from different engineering disciplines and e.g. permitted to improve the accuracy of navigation alignment filters by more than a factor 100 and reduced the alignment time by more than a factor 100 [2]. In the mid 1980 these design tools were adopted for functional level design processes in automotive industry that are being used today. In the meantime, the complexity of electronics increased by nearly a factor 10000. Today’s automobiles include networked embedded systems with up to 100 electronic control units (ECUs) and cooperating hardware and software components. Since functional level design does not permit to simulate the overall system and the interaction of hardware and software, it does not provide validated executible specifications for the sub system designer. Neither the subsystems nor the overall system can be sufficiently validated. Subsystems like ECUs exhibit failure rates up to two orders of magnitude and more above those desired. Despite exponentially increasing validation cost, large scale recalls of automobiles accelerate because of problems with electronics, causing billions of € of losses for the automotive industry. During the last 10 years, the Mission Level Design flow [3] and Mission Level Design software [4] have been developed, that integrate the design flow for hardware and software from mission level to implementation. In this design methodology, most design decisions are done at the architectural/performance level early in the design process, permitting to to include requirements of the overall system and the ineraction of hardware and software. Development times for hardware and software were reduced by up to a factor 10 and system reliability has been increased. During a diploma thesis at Infineon [5], a Mission MISSION LEVEL