The ECU - An Imaginary or Embryonic Form of Money: What Can We Learn from History?

We present historical examples of new forms of money that can be com- pared with the ECU. We first define the ECU in its official role before turning to developments in the private market for ECUs. We then examine historical antecedents of three attributes of ECUs: a unit of account; a basket of currencies; a basis for monetary integration. We discuss which features if any of ECUs are unique, and the contribution of the historical analysis to assessing the future of ECUs. We then ask whether governments or markets have been dominant in the emergence of new forms of money. Whatever emerges as money in an economy becomes the general means of payment. Prices of commodities, services, and bonds are expressed in units of the money. Buyers use the money to purchase goods or bonds and sellers receive the money is exchange for goods or bonds. We conclude that, at this stage in its history, the ECU at best is an embryonic form of money, closer to historical imaginary monies than to existing currencies that the world has known.

Load Balancing in Multi ECU Configuration

Electronic Control Units (ECUs) are widely used to improve the comfort and reliability of vehicles. It has become the fundamental building block of any automotive subsystem and is interfaced with electro mechanics counterpart. To meet the system wide requirements, these ECUs are interconnected using the communication infrastructure. Although the communication infrastructure in terms of, predominantly, the CAN based vehicle network took its birth to enable ECUs to work in a coordinated manner in order to support system wide requirements, during the past decade, this infrastructure was also viewed as a potential means to incorporate extensibility in terms of addition of newer ECUs which are built for implementing additional requirements. With this paradigm, the number of ECUs started growing in a steep manner, uncontrolled and as a result, today, it is not hard to see a high segment automotive housing ECUs as large as 75-80. Hence, load balancing mechanisms are needed to ease ECU integration and for efficient utilization of CPU power in ECUs. In this paper, we explain the mathematical approach for load balancing across ECUs on the basis of CPU utilization

Load balancing issues in automotives

Electronic Control Units (ECUs) are widely used to improve the comfort and reliability of vehicles. It has become the fundamental building block of any automotive subsystem and is interfaced with electro mechanics counterpart. To meet the system wide requirements, these ECUs are interconnected using the communication infrastructure. Although the communication infrastructure in terms of, predominantly, the CAN based vehicle network took its birth to enable ECUs to work in a coordinated manner in order to support system wide requirements, during the past decade, this infrastructure was also viewed as a potential means to incorporate extensibility in terms of addition of newer ECUs which are built for implementing additional requirements. With this paradigm, the number of ECUs started growing in a steep manner, uncontrolled and as a result, today, it is not hard to see a high segment automotive housing ECUs as large as 75–80. Hence, load balancing mechanisms are needed to ease ECU integration and for efficient utilization of CPU power in ECUs. In this paper, we explain the concept of load balancing on the basis of CPU utilization across ECUs

Efficient Memory-Protected Integration of Add-On Software Subsystems in Small Embedded Automotive Applications

Current innovations in the automotive industry evolve mainly in the electronics and software domain. This leads to an increasing integration of additional software subsystems into already existing electronic control units (ECUs) to cope with the raised amount and complexity of present ECUs in modern high-end vehicles. This paper discusses different approaches which are required to integrate such add-on software subsystems in an isolated memory domain, and considers particularly the special needs of small embedded systems—including the limited hardware support. Special focus is brought to the efficient detection of malicious memory accesses, as well as the benefits of a thereupon possible and adaptable failure-handling strategy. All investigations are based on a developed memory-protection framework which has been tailored to the special needs of a sample vehicle dynamics control system. Its usage allows the combination of. integrating additional subsystems without reducing the main application’s availability