New Serial Microcontroller Links - Micro-Link-Interface and Micro-Second-Channel

Trends in today's and future embedded powertrain systems show a strongly growing demand of communication between the functional units inside a car. A cost optimized system partitioning leads to several independent building blocks that have to be interconnected. Depending on the task of each building block, different classes of data exchange can be distinguished, differing in the required bandwidth, the tolerated latency and speed for real time critical tasks. In order to minimize the communication effort concerning time, chip size and overall costs, different communication requirements have been analyzed. The results lead to improvements of standard serial interfaces by application-oriented features.

This paper deals with two new approaches for serial interface modules:

• Micro Link Serial Interface (MLI) which creates a new way of low-cost inter-processor communication and
• Micro Second Channel (MSC) which has been developed in order to reduce the number of connections between a microcontroller and a power device