E-VCU Software Toolbox for ARM Cortex-R4 Processor based Electric Vehicle Control

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are essential for addressing climate change but developing a safe and reliable EV presents sig-nificant challenges. Compliance with functional safety standards, such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262, is vital for EV manufacturers. However, the traditional approach of writing functional safety-compliant C code for Electric Vehicle Control Unit's (E-VCU) is complex, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Companies who provide selective hardware with model-based design support with specific software environment such as dSPACE, VECTOR, Speed Goat and NI, are increasingly preferred by the industry to address these issues. As such, we propose a MATLAB/Simulink toolbox that allows users to do development on the TMS570LS31x microcontroller through Simulink interface to address the same issues. Our toolbox streamlines the design process by allowing for easy and efficient development of software models without re-quiring extensive hard coding. Additionally, the selected software environment provides tools to verify and validate the functional safety compliance of the Simulink models, ensuring the resulting product meets automotive grade safety-critical standards. We test our library using a novel TMS570LS31x-based E-VCU on a test bench and a real electric car. The system's functionality is monitored using our data logger blocks and Graphical User Interface (GUI) application in real-time.

I. Introduction

In many fast-growing fields such as automotive, aerospace, and medicine, safety-critical systems are essential. In these fields, it is crucial to consider the potential consequences of failure scenarios. Safety-critical systems must guarantee appropriate behavior even in the event of failure. Therefore, following the functional safety standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 is necessary during the development of these systems [1].