Virtual prototyping for efficient multi-core ECU development of driver assistance systems

In recent years, road vehicles have experienced an enormous increase in driver assistance systems such as traffic sign recognition, lane departure warning, and pedestrian detection. Cost-efficient development of electronic control units (ECUs) for these systems is a complex challenge. The demand for shortened time to market makes the development even more challenging and thus demands efficient design flows. This paper proposes a model-based design flow that permits simulation-based performance evaluation of multi-core ECUs for driver assistance systems in a pre-development stage. The approach is based on a system-level virtual prototype of a multi-core ECU and allows the evaluation of timing effects by mapping application tasks to different platforms. The results show that performance estimation of different parallel implementation candidates is possible with high accuracy even in a pre-development stage. By adapting the best-fitting parallelization strategy to the final ECU, a reduction in the time to market period is possible. Currently, the design flow is being evaluated by Daimler AG and is being applied to a pedestrian detection system. Results from this application illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.