Automotive

Engineering Tasks

• System Specification and Modeling
• Embedded System Design
• System Integration, Calibration, and Dynamometer Testing
• Vehicle Analysis and Validation

Embedded System Design

Among the challenges of embedded automotive systems development involves correctly implementing requirements and specifications created by the system designer. These specifications are often delivered to embedded systems and software engineers in the form of written documents, flow charts, and sample code that must then be manually implemented in the embedded system.

With Model-Based Design, everyone works from the same models, avoiding time-consuming, manual coding tasks and reducing the potential for errors. Ultimately, this approach lets you produce better products, faster and at lower cost.

Simulink® and other MathWorks tools reduce development time and costs by enabling you to:

• Run real-time plant simulations with hardware-in-the-loop systems
• Rapidly prototype ideas on real vehicle systems
• Generate production C code from models

Algorithm Design
MATLAB® and its toolboxes for signal processing, control design, optimization, neural networks, and other techniques provide a rich environment for designing new algorithmic operations and evaluating their feasibility for powertrain, chassis, safety, and infotainment systems.

Rapid Prototyping
Simulink software and Stateflow® models can automatically generate code for real-time execution, enabling you to analyze and refine algorithms prior to deployment on embedded systems. xPC Target™ software and real-time systems from MathWorks partners provide a broad range of rapid-prototyping hardware options. These systems let you perform functional prototyping, bypass prototyping, and on-target rapid prototyping.

Production Code Generation
From the models you create, MathWorks code generation tools produce efficient, readable code for systems with limited resources, such as engine control systems, chassis control systems, climate control supervisory logic, and power seats. Generated code can be targeted to specific processors and operating systems commonly found in embedded automotive systems, including the Motorola MPC555 and HC12, Infineon C166, and the OSEK operating system.

The result is automatically generated code with RAM, ROM, and chronometric (CPU throughput) performance that often surpasses hand-generated code.

HDL Generation and DSP Testing
With the increasing use of DSP and FPGA functionality in embedded automotive systems, engineers are using many of the Simulink capabilities and blocksets traditionally used in the communications industry. The MATLAB and Simulink products provide an integrated environment for algorithm development, simulation, code generation, and verification to accelerate the design of signal processing and communication systems.

From Simulink, you can generate C code for DSP devices. Integration with tools from Texas Instruments, Xilinx, and Altera also enable you to test DSP functionality and generate HDL code for FPGA devices. In both cases, you eliminate the programming stage, accelerating the development and deployment process.

Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing
Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing is ideal when real hardware or vehicles are not available, or when you must test conditions that are dangerous or impossible to recreate with real vehicle systems. HIL testing lets you test embedded systems algorithms in real-time, in a lab environment.

You can create continuous- and discrete-time models of vehicle, driver, and road conditions in Simulink, and then generate code with the Real-Time Workshop® product for HIL testing. HIL enables the simulation of real production code on a surrogate target (desktop), the MathWorks xPC Target™ system, and a broad range of targets from MathWorks partners.

Learn more about Verification, Validation, and Test in Model-Based Design.

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