Search Results

Electronics in vehicles are an ongoing success story. Over the last years the in-vehicle network that interconnects the electronic subsystems has developed into a key constituent of the overall electronic vehicle architecture. Over the last years an industry consortium of more than 120 companies has developed the FlexRay Communications System - a time-deterministic protocol with a data rate of 10MBit/s for advanced control systems in vehicles. In this paper we briefly recap the history of this development and provide the main rationales for the protocol mechanisms as they are defined today. While the FlexRay Protocol itself is defined rigorously using the formal Specification and Description Language SDL the FlexRay Communications System provides certain degrees of freedom in the design of the controller host interface that interfaces the FlexRay Protocol to the higher application levels.

As part of the continuous development of the car, the implementation of “by-wire” solutions provides vehicle manufacturers with advantages such as weight savings, simplified modular assembly and test, and increased flexibility of physical placement. In Electro-Mechanical Braking, a type of “Brake-by-Wire”, the hydraulic control structure is replaced by electronic control units, linked to electromechanical actuators, to provide reliable and fault tolerant foundation braking of the vehicle In an effort to provide timely and effective semiconductor system solutions to our customers, Motorola Semiconductor Product Sector's Advanced Vehicle Systems Architecture group has carried out a study into the specialized requirements of EMB over the past two years. Analysis of these requirements led to the development of an architecture which used new cost-effective approaches to the problem of implementing fault tolerance.