Driver Assistance
All Programmable SoC enables parallelism, customization, and versatility for electronic control units.
Automakers today are adding ever more advanced functions into the electronic control units (ECUs) distributed in their automobiles to improve the driving experience, enhance safety and, of course, outsell the competition. In such a landscape, the Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) initiative and the international functional-safety standard ISO 26262 are fast forming the technical and architectural underpinnings of automotive ECU design.
The AUTOSAR and ISO 26262 directives are mainly driven from a software development perspective and oriented toward computing platforms based on microcontroller units. However, the introduction of hardware/software codesign and reconfigurable computing techniques can bring some advantages in this arena. The All Programmable SoC approach can attain system performance comparable to that of a multiprocessor platform but with the simplicity of a single-core processor, thanks to the use of powerful and autonomous custom coprocessors that work in parallel with the host processor.
Additional Information
- Excerpts taken from "Making Biometrics the Killer App of FPGA Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration" in Xcell Journal Issue 72
- Read more, in the article, “FPGA-based Automotive ECU Design Addresses AUTOSAR and ISO 26262 Standards,” in Xcell Journal Issue 78