The basic design principles of the four-stroke internal combustion engine has remained basically the same since patented in 1884. However, the engine control electronics have changed dramatically. The primary motivation is the need to meet legislative exhaust emission levels, provide competitive fuel economy, and meet customer quality expectations. For example, electronic fuel control is an enabler for meeting emissions and fuel economy goals. It also provides a variety of customer comfort features like cruise control, cold startability, fuel shutoff safety feature, and security lockout on startup.
Today's vehicles have features such as gasoline direct injection (GDI), knock detection, catalytic converters, oxygen sensors, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), evaporative emission control systems (canister purge and vent solenoid), misfire detection, and secondary air systems. Tomorrow's vehicles will feature electronic throttle control (ETC), variable valve timing, cylinder deactivation, camless engines, in-cylinder combustion control, electronic stability, collision avoidance, and remote starting. These features will spawn new methods such as autocoding, autocalibration, generic operating systems, floating point math, DSP algorithms, and model-based control.
By Martin Mason, Actel Corp. As an FPGA vendor, it warms the cockles of my heart to hear an automotive customer say: “I would never get any [ASSPs] in production. They’re the electronic equivalent of fruit flies.”