These days in automotive industry, AUTOSAR has been increasingly used as a standard and unified software platform as vehicle electronics have becoming more variety, more performance and more complicated. MCAL is a software driver which belongs to lowest level in AUTOSAR software structure. MCAL directly access the microcontroller hardware and is provided by microcontroller supplier like Infineon to handle microcontroller peripherals. And in cases for special dedicated functions of microcontroller or for special requirements, Complex Device Driver could be used as legacy software instead of MCAL.
The paper is structured as follows: First, the SPI requirements for vehicle applications such as chassis will be shown. Then, the current AUTOSAR specification for SPI MCAL will be explained in detail. Next, the sequential SPI communication and the parallel SPI communication with multi-nodes will be discussed. This paper will also indicate why the parallel SPI communication is recommended to meet certain automotive requirements. In addition, several detailed requirements to support parallel SPI will be proposed based on field experiences. Finally, this paper will offer a detailed software flow proposal to meet automotive requirements.
The Infineon 32-bit TriCore™ microcontroller, AURIX™ [3] is used for performance evaluation for the parallel SPI communication with multi-nodes. It will be predicted based on Infineon MCAL, MC-ISAR driver [4] in areas such as interrupt response time and SPI driver execution time.