Multi-Microcontroller Emulation of Sensors, Actuators and Systems for Flexible Integration of Complex Devices

With increasing of the complexity and size of today's embedded systems, verification of the hardware and embedded software has become the critical challenge in the development process. Safety related systems, such as automotive, railways and medical, require even more detailed and documented process for quality assessment, and thus massive tests spanning billions of cycles. Meeting this challenge requires multilateral, advanced verification technologies delivering the highest performance possible to accelerate the verification process. A step towards system test automation and acceleration is real time hardware emulation. There are numerous approaches, related to it, generally called hardware in the loop (HIL). Some of them aim to emulate the target microcontrollers, others - the attached peripherals. In this paper we present multi-microcontroller system that emulates different peripheral types. Using an example use-case from the automotive industry (automotive seat heater) are discussed the possible emulation speeds, synchronization, and the difference between the emulation and the real system setup.