ESL (Electric System Level) Design Methodologies enable us to design and verify various electrical behaviors of automotive electronics including automotive semiconductors on a simulator before hardware prototyping. It could facilitate the optimization of hardware structures, and shorten the total development period by reducing rework process. We propose the “ESL Design Methodologies for Automotive” to renovate conventional development scheme.
ESL technology began to be used from the domain of digital consumer electronics. Regarding automotive electronics domain, however, we would not be able to adapt the same methodologies to automotive systems, which consist of many mixed-signal components. Also, another approach is required for the rising demand of safety design sort of functional safety.
In this research, we extracted some requirements of models and environments concerning automotive semiconductors, which were necessary to verify ECU(Electronic Control Unit) operations and in-vehicle LANs(Local Area Network), and developed the modeling technologies to achieve enough accuracy as well as simulation performance. Also, its effects were confirmed in several examples.
As there are many players in automotive electronics systems, the cooperation among vehicle manufacturers, parts manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers and tool vendors would be indispensable to implement ESL for Automotive. To forward the cooperation, this paper proposes the need for a standardization of modeling framework.