Method to Efficiently Implement Automotive Application Algorithms Using Signal Processing Engine (SPE) of Copperhead Microcontroller

This paper presents the studies on how to efficiently and easily implement ECU application algorithms using the Signal Processing Engine (SPE) of the Copperhead microcontroller. With the introduced development and testing concepts and methods, users can easily establish their own PC based SPE emulation system. All application unit testing and verification work for the fixed point implementation using SPE functions can be easily conducted in PC without relying on a costly real time test bench and expensive third party dedicated software. With this simple development environment, the code can be run in both embedded controllers and PCs with exact bit to bit numerical behavior. The paper also demonstrates many other benefits such as code statistics information retrieval, floating simulation mode, automated code verification, online and offline code sharing. As an example, knock detection algorithms were used to evaluate the SPE's benefits in computational time compared with conventional C implementation. The result shows more than 50% computation time reduction with the SPE.