An Integrated Approach to Car Body Control Using SOPC Technology

As the rate of electronical components in cars permanently grows, the qualitative and quantitative tasks and demands in this field increase heavily. Integrated solutions and interconnectivity impose a demanding challenge to automotive industry including requirements, such as safety, high inherent reliability, and fault-tolerance. The proposed research focuses on the modeling, design and study an efficient SOPC implementation of the electronic control unit (ECU) for car body control system that would have a superior performance over the existing technology. With the flexibility of an FPGA, the ECU can be adopted to any available bus like CAN, LIN, FlexRay or a proprietary bus without changing the system architecture and adding additional external components. A soft processor core optimised for FPGA is used as system controller. The proposed implementation has been developed by using the hardware description language, and has been synthesized placed and routed in an Altera FPGA device. Using FPGA, cost of the new ECU can be kept low, making the new car body control system affordable for customers and thus improving operational convenience. Finally, we also developed an experimental prototype for testing of the system on an actual car.