Practical solution for automotive electronic throttle control based on FPGA

The throttle valve or electronic throttle valve is one of the critical parts of car power-train control. It plays an important role in improving motor vehicle dynamic characteristics, safety and comfort, reducing pollution discharge. This paper introduces a practical solution for automotive electronic throttle control (ETC) based on Xilinx-FPGA, in which analyses the characteristic of the throttle valve, develops the system process model and researches the control strategy. A kind of dual control algorithm is proposed in the paper. That means in the large-signal control mode as start-up period of throttle valve from zero, the entire system is regarded as linear and the response is determined by the PID controller; while in the small-signal control mode during running time, the nonlinear friction and spring force compensator and air disturbance has the dominant influence on the control system behavior. Then it substitutes the original control models on Matlab/Simulink platform combined with the models from Xilinx Blockset library, and simulates the system simultaneously by software and co-hardware to verify the design. At last it gives the real-time control result with Xilinx-FPGA application.