Robert Leinfellner

A New Calibration System for ECU Development

Automotive manufacturers and suppliers of electronic control units (ECUs) will be challenged more and more in the future to reduce costs and the time needed for ECU development. At the same time, increasing requirements concerning exhaust gas emissions, drivability, onboard diagnostics and fuel consumption have led to the growing complexity of modern engines and the associated management systems. As a result, the number and complexity of control parameters and look-up tables in the ECU software is increasing dramatically. Thus, in powertrain applications especially, calibration development has become a time-consuming and cost-intensive stage in the overall ECU development process. This paper describes the current situation in calibration development and shows how the new dSPACE Calibration System will face this situation. It provides an overview of the main benefits of the tool, which has been designed in close cooperation with calibration engineers. A special focus will be on how the tool contributes to saving calibration costs and development time. Further emphasis will be placed on integration into the dSPACE tool chain, providing a complete environment for the development of ECU software. Interaction with tools for control design, function prototyping, target implementation and ECU testing will be detailed. In addition, the paper describes how international standards like ASAM/ASAP and NEXUS facilitate the calibration process and how these standards are supported by dSPACE.