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The combustion engine will be the dominant drive for motor vehicles despite all the advances in the electrification of the drive train, for many years. The greater are the challenges for the automotive industry, especially in fuel consumption (CO2) and the environmental impacts of other emissions. From the fuel supply to the engine, up to the exhaust after treatment, new or improved functions are needed, which are integrated into increasingly powerful control electronics. This modern electronic engine management and powertrain controller will remain key components in the vehicle. As most of the micro controllers for future applications will be MultiCores, this paper gives an overview on how PowerSAR® supports this kind of architectures. It shows the concepts applied in the basic software area as well as for the applicative software. Further it will show the impact on the development process as well as the integration support for software delivered by the OEM.

For the world's challenge of sustainability in individual mass mobility a wide range of solutions has been proposed to the community. But besides all progress in the electrification of the drive train, the combustion engine will continue to play a dominant role for individual travel and privately owned cars for the next 10 to 20 years. The challenges for car makers and engine designers become even higher, since future demands concerning emissions and fuel consumption have to be met. Consequently, with the proposed innovations and the combinations of several individual improvements the Engine Management System will become more and more complex in terms of technical solution and players involved during the development. Hence, support of improved or even alternative system architectures, including alternative function deployment between the electrical units needs to be supported.

In 1997, Siemens VDO Automotive began supplying a side impact pressure sensor to the OEM passenger car market, for front row side protection. The pressure sensors have been successfully applied to more than ten vehicle platforms, with over ten million sensors supplied to date. The automotive industry is developing new and enhanced crash protection requirements. In support of these requirements, expandable and scaleable systems are inherent to providing optimal and reliable side impact detection. By using at least two complimentary sensing technologies, in combination with multi-input data evaluation, a wide variety of vehicle setups are imaginable. The result is significantly improved restraint activation performance and robustness across different side impact scenarios. Included are new demands, like the high bumper/hood SUV-type impact as proposed by the IIHS, as well as side pole crashes specified by FMVSS 201.

This paper describes the application and the algorithm concepts of a high volume product for a very fast side impact detection system. To activate a side airbag the inner-door air pressure is measured by the sensing system. Specific characteristics of this pressure signal reflect different crash modes and, in conjunction with intelligent algorithms, very short activation times for side impact restraint systems are reached. These deployment times are typically faster than those of acceleration based sensing systems æ usually less than 5ms in all legal test modes. In addition to this the system is very robust during real world driving conditions such as crossing railroad tracks and potholes or more generally in events which do not compress the air of the inner-door cavity. Result tables of firing times to compare the acceleration- and the pressure-based system are included for several platforms.