On the Suitability of Multi-Core Processing for Embedded Automotive Systems

Abstract

This paper examines the suitability of multi-core processors over single core in automotive safety critical applications. As vehicles become more and more complex with an embedded network interconnection of ECUs (Electronic Control Unit) and integrate more and more features, safety standardization is becoming increasingly important among the automakers and OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacture). Thus the demand for computing power is increasing by the day in the automotive domain to meet all the requirements of time critical functionalities. Multi-core processor hardware is seen as a solution to the problem of increasing the ECU processing power with the support of software and also to power consumption with frequency. In this work, ABS (Anti-Lock Braking System) is taken as an example to demonstrate the suitability of multicore processor. It is shown how, through the scheduling of events in the hard braking system, multicore processor can help in achieving near real time response. The performance of ABS has been studied with the help of TMS570 which is a dual core controller from Texas Instruments (TI) and compared with TMS470 which is single core controller from the same company. A software architecture using MPI (Message Passing Interface) with shared memory is described in detail and applied to quantify the performance. In addition to performance, a comparative study of power consumption by TMS570 operating at 150MHz and TMS470 operating at 80MHz at an ambient temperature of 25oC has been studied in detail.