The demands of the automotive market are decreasing the time-to-market required from the initial concept of new control systems to their implementation. The goal of automotive companies is to constantly reduce the development time to reap the full economic and strategic benefits of being quicker to market. The target is to reach a development time of less than 12 months for some applications. At the same time, the complexity of these new systems is growing almost exponentially.
While new techniques like model-based control design with executable specifications, rapid control prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop simulation have helped significantly streamline the development process, the new strategies are still being transferred to the production target by hand.
During an early project phase, automotive customers also need to explore different silicon architectures provided by semiconductor manufacturers to select the vendors who can offer the best solution at the lowest price. As a result, software developers are confronted with these new architectures which sometimes need completely different code to exploit the hardware features.
To meet this challenge, tools are necessary that can automatically generate code from the block diagrams used as executable specifications. This code must take the different architectures into account.
Using such tools provides the following benefits:
- 1
Reduction in development time and resources
- 2
Reduction of bugs
- 3
Easy platform change (μController)
- 4
Easy verification of new engine functions by using rapid prototyping tools
Semiconductor manufacturers must work closely together with auto-code generator vendors and compiler companies to produce a result that optimally uses all the resources made available in a CPU.