Usage of run-time re-configuration for system porting in automotive applications

Abstract

The automotive industry is now facing many problems and challenges that put many restrictions on car design, towards the minimization of the car cost. Most of the problems arise from the continuously increasing need to provide more advanced features in the modern cars. This lead to a dramatically increase in the percentage electronics inside the car, which lead to increasing the number of Electronic Control Unit in the Cars. This will lead to power consumption problems, wiring problems, code complexity problems, and the most important, the obsolescence problems. In this paper, we will use the runtime partial reconfiguration feature of the FPGA to minimize the costs associated with migration and porting of the software due to microcontroller obsolescence. ©2009 IEEE.