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

A number of techniques and software tools for embedded sys- tem design have been recently proposed. However, the cur- rent practice in the designer community is heavily based on manual techniques and on past experience rather than on a rigorous approach to design. To advance the state of the art it is important to address a number of relevant design prob- lems and solve them to demonstrate the power of the new approaches. We chose an industrial example in automotive electronics to validate our design methodology: an existing commercially available Engine Control Unit. We discuss in detail the spec- ication, the implementation philosophy, and the architec- tural trade-o analysis. We analyze the results obtained with our approach and compare them with the existing design un- derlining the advantages oered by a systematic approach to embedded system design in terms of performance and design time.