A Case Study on Dependable Network-on-Chip Platform for Automotive Applications

摘要

This report presents our first trial to apply a Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture to a gasoline engine control, one of automotive applications that require high dependability. CPU cores in our NoC platform implement a production grade Electric Control Unit (ECU) for a gasoline engine, and compute some of the critical control outputs including injection timing, injection duration and ignition timing from the corresponding sensor data. In a NoC based architecture, connection between sensors/actuators and ECUs can be flexible. This makes it easy for our NoC platform to control an engine with high depend­ability, by having redundant CPU cores where the engine control application software is redundantly stored and an external 10 core that dispatches the computation to a non-faulty CPU based on online failure detection. We demonstrated that the engine controlled by our NoC based ECUs could be kept running properly despite a (simulated) failure of one of the CPU cores.