Development of platform for rapid control prototyping technique

In today's extremely competitive, technically challenging, cost sensitive market place, the design process must be improved to shorten the design time and remove the costs associated with building engineering development controllers. Embedded system software is steadily increasing in size and sophistication, as well as in terms of the complexity of the hardware and environmental interfaces, which in turn, adversely impacts the Electronic Control Unit(ECU) time-to-market and quality. To remedy the increasing complexity, the trade-off between software and hardware can now be investigated via concurrent development early in the design cycle. This paper suggests a development method for ECU embedded system software by using Matlab (R)/Simulink (R)(Mathworks Corporation). Matlab (R)/Simulink (R) provides the ability to quickly evaluate enhancements to existing algorithms and to evaluate new control or diagnostic concepts, making it a rapid medium for developing, testing and validating the real-target system. In this paper, the ECU embedded system containing MPC565 MCU is used as a real-target system. Using this method, it is possible to quickly check for performance issues and consider needed corrections or enhancements without incurring the time and cost burden associated with ECU embedded system software development.