Accelerating validation of time-triggered automotive systems on FPGAs

Automotive systems comprise a high number of networked safety-critical functions. Any design changes or addition of new functionality must be rigorously tested to ensure that no performance or safety issues are introduced, and this consumes a significant amount of time. Validation should be conducted using a faithful representation of the system, and so typically, a full subsystem is built for validation. We present a scalable scheme for emulating a complete cluster of automotive embedded compute units on an FPGA, with accelerated network communication using custom physical level interfaces. With these interfaces, we can achieve acceleration of system emulation by 8× or more, with a systematic way of exploring real-world issues like jitter, network delays, and data corruption, among others. By using the same communication infrastructure as in a real deployed system, this validation is closer to the requirements of standards compliance. This approach also enables hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) validation, allowing rapid prototyping of distributed functions, including changes in network topology and parameters, and modification of time-triggered schedules without physical hardware modification. We present an implementation of this framework on the Xilinx ML605 evaluation board that integrates six FlexRay automotive functions to demonstrate the potential of the framework.