EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

Extensible prototyping

While automotive electronics makes driving much more comfortable, »electronified« modern cars also have shorter lifetime and design time than »oldtimers«. So, the new car with the heatable cigarette lighter won’t last for 20+ years like but we won’t have to wait 10 years for the successor. Development tools need to develop even faster…

TriCore on the road

We’ve all heard about the 60, 80 or 100 microcontrollers in todays or tomorrows cars, controlling ignition timing, displaying virtualized tachometers or illuminating the front-seat passenger’s ashtray. Since the assigned functions are so varied, those automobiles usually are a very diverse ecosystem for many different MCU families from a large number of different manufacturers.

A tiny controller in a big car

More electronics, increasingly complex software: Modern cars are embedded systems on wheels. While communication between ECUs (Electronic control units) and other on-board systems has become more or less standardized with bus systems like CAN, LIN and sometimes already MOST and Flexray , there are still many proprietary communication solutions in the powertrain area.

Measuring LIN

While LIN is the PHY- and protocol-wise the simplest of the currently used bus systems in cars, more often than not analysing systems know more about CAN , Flexray or even MOST than about the uncomplicated two-wire connection.

MSO analyses FlexRay

Youngsters may not remember the ‘ancient’ times when radio was the only electronic (well, more or less) device in a car. Nowadays almost every component of the vehicle has some electronic feature or other that makes specialized internal communications networks necessary. One of these bus systems is FlexRay, a general purpose high-speed protocol with safety-critical features. Yokogawa has kept an eye on it: A FlexRay serial bus analysis function is now available as an option to the 4-channel models in the DLM2000 series of mixed-signal oscilloscopes.

FlexRay test tool stripped to the bone

Goepel Electronic recently introduced a new FlexRay test tool. basicFlexScope 3095 is a bus analysis and validation tool for FlexRay networks that integrates four functions; bus analyser, bus simulator, oscilloscope trigger and fault simulator.