HW resource componentizing for smooth migration from single-function ECU to multi-function ECU

The automotive design paradigm is shifting from the "one-function on one ECU (Electronic Control Unit)" paradigm toward the "multi-function on one ECU" paradigm to reduce the ever increasing number of ECUs in a vehicle. In order to support such paradigm shift, this paper proposes a HW (hardware) resource componentizing technique that provides the illusion of a physically isolated ECU component for each automotive SW (software) component even when a multi-function ECU is actually shared by multiple concurrent SW components. With this technique, each SW component's physical properties such as timing behavior can be invariant with its surrounding SW components and hence the automaker can easily compose and verify a complex future automotive system. In order to effectively realize this HW resource componentizing, we propose an"active window based share provisioning" that provides a HW share to a SW component only when it is active. This way, the ECU capacity can be divided not only in the spatial (i.e., share) domain but also in the temporal domain, providing a large number of fine-granular HW components for serving a large number of SW components. The effectiveness of the proposed HW com-ponentizing technique is validated through both simulation and actual implementation with real automotive workload.