EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

In the aftermarket

Modern cars are practically heaps of electronic components, and various interfaces allow for diagnostic access of the subsystems. One of the consequences is that it has become increasingly difficult to conduct even small repairs yourself, another is a booming service tools market. A market everyone wants a share of.

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.

The three-bus board

Among the most critical points in automotive electronics are intersections of different bus systems. Those areas need to be designed and tested thoroughly – and it’s a bonus when the development device can be used in all stages, even in production.

Darwin in automotive testing

For processes that are controlled by embedded systems, more and more software is needed in vehicles that has to be put through its paces in order to ensure safety and reliability. In a modern car, this software often contains more than ten million lines of software code. The difficulty is to define meaningful tests to eliminate as many potential failure causes as possible already in the software test phase. An evolutionary approach might provide the right test for the right situation.

Testing ECUs

Modern cars consist of dozens of electronic control units. This modular architecture facilitates development and manufacturing as well as after-sales service. Even testing isn’t too hard, except when it comes to interactions between the modules. At that point, functional testing needs to go hand in hand with communications analysis.

Electric cars can be safe

Are electric vehicles safe on the road? Well… nobody knows, since the usual extensive (and destructive) tests haven’t been conducted. The whole class of cars is too new to have gone through the bone crusher, but this is changing. Slowly.