System concept for an FPGA based real-time capable automotive ECU simulation system

During the development of automotive electric/electronic architectures testing is usually accomplished by software based approaches on standard PCs. Simulating many ECUs on a single PC highly influences the bus communication thus biasing the results for performance and latency tests. Based on the commonly used software CANoe we propose a system concept for an FPGA based simulator equipped with a real-time data logger. Due to parallelization the system achieves a much higher accuracy for bus communication compared to a single PC approach. Moreover we address reusability of already existing CANoe models in our system. In this paper the system concept is introduced. We present the different modules and show the major benefits. A system prototype has been implemented to proof the system concept concerning functionality.