Safer ECUs

The ISO 26262 functional safety standard for road vehicles poses various problems for component manufacturers as well as for system integrators. Luckily, not all control units in a car are that safety critical, but the ones that need to comply require extensive checking and testing during all stages of product development.

As standardization efforts in general are gaining ground and safety regulations have become compulsory, many involved manufacturers offer »prefab« compliance kits. Right now, Toshiba Electronics Europe is offering an embedded development kit for design, development, integration and testing of automotive ECU (electronic control unit) applications that need to comply with the ISO 26262 functional safety standard for road vehicles. The kit has been developed by IAR.
This »IAR KickStart Kit« provides hardware, software and tools for developing an embedded application for Toshiba’s   microcontroller TMPM350FDFTG. This ARM-based device has been specifically designed to meet the needs of electric power steering control applications.

Operating at up to 88 MHz, the TMP350FDFTG combines an ARM Cortex-M3 CPU core with 512 KByte of embedded Nano Flash ROM and 48 KByte of RAM. An integrated dual channel CAN controller (2.0B) and advanced motor control circuitry as well as on-board fault supervisors simplify compliance with ISO 26262.
The KickStart Kit comprises a microcontroller evaluation board, IAR’s graphical design environment visualSTATE and the integrated development environment Embedded Workbench for ARM-based processors. A J-Link hardware debug probe that connects via USB to a host PC provides JTAG debugging functionality in accordance with ARM specifications.
In addition to the microcontroller, the kit’s evaluation board provides a JTAG connector for programming/debugging, CAN, USB, RS232 and UART connectivity, a power jack and four user-programmable buttons. The board also incorporates eight user LEDs, a potentiometer input analogue signal and two on-board crystal oscillators.
The TMPM350FDFTG provides functional safety compliance in accordance with ISO 26262 through a distributed safety architecture built around tightly coupled fault supervisors. These supervisors, based on IP by Yogitech, run algorithms that monitor the operation of each of the MCU’s functional blocks using »faultRobust« (fR) blocks of safety IP implemented close to key functions such as the CPU, buses, timers and memory. An fRNET block collects diagnostic information from each individual function while Toshiba hardware diagnostic (ThwD) blocks provide further safety monitoring. The KickStart kit is equipped with the necessary software code to initialise this on-board safety structure.



Comments

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I am very impresed! I agree that the ecu is one of the most important parts that we have to check. I am saying that as i am working with ecus. Very nice equipment good job ;)