CAN FD Software Stack Integration Project for a Tier-I supplier

Customer:

Our client is a reputed automotive Tier-1 supplier. They are global leaders in manufacturing of various components for vehicle interiors.

They have a formidable reputation in effectively nurturing technology R&D to launch cutting-edge product lines in the market.
 

Business Challenge:

Developing automotive software stacks in-house from scratch can be a time-consuming process.

Innovation centric automotive OEMs’ and Suppliers always prefer to focus on the core product development activities and engage with a capable technology partner for additional support.

Our customer, on the similar lines, decided to integrate a ready-to-deploy CAN FD stack solution to ensure that their product development teams focus on the core activities.

Additionally, our customer wanted to partner with a technology vendor who can provide support for CAN FD stack integration and maintenance services.
 

Why this reputed automotive Tier-I Supplier wanted to migrate from Classical CAN to CAN FD software?

The legacy CAN BUS protocol supports less than 1 Mbit/s bandwidth for automotive ECU data transmission.

However, for several automotive applications, end-of-line testing and ECU software updates, there is need for faster data transmission and support for larger payload.

Since CAN FD software stack supports up to 64 bytes of data, our customer decided to integrate the same across product lines.
 

Embitel Solution:

• This automotive Tier-I Supplier after initial demonstrations, developed trust in the quality of the source code of our CAN FD stack
• Our customer also developed confidence in our automotive domain expertise and our experience in integration, testing and maintenance services.
• We partnered with this renowned automotive supplier for CAN FD stack integration project.
  
  Following are some of the important features of the integrated CAN FD software solution:
  • The software package consists of the low-level device drivers developed to support hardware abstraction from the underlying hardware platform.
  • This reusable CAN FD stack (CAN FD Interface layer and CAN FD Network Layer) is platform independent (compatible with all 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers).
  • The CAN FD software stack is compatible with both non-RTOS and RTOS system.
  • We developed and deployed customized Application Programming Interfaces for the end user application.
• Our automotive team has successfully integrated the following CAN FD software stack layers:
  • CAN FD Driver
  • CAN FD Interface Layer
  • CAN FD Network Layer
• The Interface Layer of the CAN FD software protocol stack supports static configuration of Tx and Rx messages.
• An integration test or sanity test was executed for the end user application after integration of the CAN FD software stack.
• The CAN FD stack is verified and validated as per the pre-defined test case by ISO 16845 standards.

Embitel Impact:

• Our pre-packed and pre-tested CAN FD protocol stack met the expectations of the customer by providing improved real-time data transfer rates, larger payloads, and backward compatibility.
• The transport layer configuration was not required in-case of CAN FD due to its higher payload support (64-bytes of data).
• After integrating the CAN FD stack, our customer realized the benefits of the faster ECU reprogramming and end-of-line software testing speed, due to larger bandwidth support.
• For instance, in classical CAN the ECU reprogramming used to take 5-6 minutes per ECU. While with CAN FD, it takes 1 minute per ECU.
• The integration of our pre-tested stack helped our customer to save time and cost on internal R&D. Thus reducing their time-to-market and overall cost of development.

Tools and Technologies:

• Hardware Platform:ST Micro Controller
• Software IDE:SPC5 Studio
• Simulator:Vector CAN-FD
• PC-Lint was used for static analysis of the embedded C code to ensure the code is MISRA-C complaint.