Automatic Code Generator for Automotive Configurable I/O System

The increasing legal requirements for safety, emission reduction, fuel economy and onboard diagnostic systems are forcing the market to increase complexity. This complexity must not be a reason for slowing down the introduction of new systems. For efficiency, car manufacturers and system suppliers want to focus on their core competencies and leave the micro-controller complexity to silicon vendors. Competition forces system suppliers to jump to the most “function/cost” effective solution. For this reason it is very dangerous to move in the direction of specific solutions which require a large amount of effort to modify. Therefore the market goes in the direction of standards with clear interfaces.

The approach presented overcomes these obstacles by introducing a Configurable I/O System (CIOS) layer. The CIOS encompasses basic software driver objects for engine management systems encapsulating the standard sensors and actuators. The drivers are provided with an open Application Programmers Interface (API) which allows the drivers to be integrated with an event driven operating systems such as OSEK [2]. The API provides the basic functionality to initialize the drivers, as well as functionality to retrieve information from the drivers, including error information. The software drivers can be configured in terms of the available sensors, actuators and hardware resources. Template-driven automatic code generation has been employed to achieve compact code that meets the real-time requirements.