An FPGA-based testing platform for the validation of automotive powertrain ECU

Over the past decade, the complexity of electronic devices in the automotive systems increased significantly. The modern high level vehicles include more than 70 Electronic Control Units (ECUs) aimed at managing the powertrain of the vehicle, and improving passengers' comfort and safety. ECU microcontrollers aimed at the control of the fuel injection system have a key role. In this paper we present a new FPGA-based platform able to supervise and validate Commercial-Off-The-Shelf timer modules used in today state-of-the-art software applications for automotive fuel injection system with an accuracy improvement of more than 20% with respect to traditional approach. The proposed approach allows an effective and accurate validation of timing signals and it has two main advantages: can be customized with the exact timing module configurations to meet the exigency of new tests and allows effective modularity design test. As case study two industrial Time Modules manufactured by Freescale and Bosch have been used. The experimental analysis demonstrates the capability of the proposed approach providing a timing and angular precision of 10 ns and 10⁻⁵ degrees respectively.