Communality of Design and Package Relevant Control Units

The key to increase efficiency in electronic control unit (ECU) development is seen today in a common parts strategy. It has the goal to use a once developed ECU in more than one product series. While for a lot of control units communality is just a matter of contained functionality, for such with visible surfaces reuse is prevented by design criteria. Exemplarily, with the roof controller from the BMW 3 series, possibilities are shown in this article how communality can still be achieved. Building blocks on different abstraction levels will be introduced as the communal parts. One will be found on circuit level. The prerequisites to communal software will be explained. By use of model based software the concept of model library will support the concepts for communality. This leads to a new business process.