A Case Study in Embedded System Design: an Engine Control Unit

A number of techniques and software toolsfor embedded system design have been recently proposed. However,the current practice in the designer community is heavily basedon manual techniques and on past experience rather than on arigorous approach to design. To advance the state of the artit is important to address a number of relevant design problemsand solve them to demonstrate the power of the new approaches.We chose an industrial example in automotive electronics to validateour design methodology: an existing commercially available EngineControl Unit. We discuss in detail the specification, the implementationphilosophy, and the architectural trade-off analysis. We analyzethe results obtained with our approach and compare them withthe existing design underlining the advantages offered by a systematicapproach to embedded system design in terms of performance and design time.