Development of AUTOSAR MCAL Drivers for a Smoother Transition to AUTOSAR Paradigm

About the Business Use-Cases

• Microcontroller Abstraction Layer drivers access the on-chip peripherals functions such as CAN, Ethernet, General Purpose Timer, Watchdog, SPI, DIO and a few others.
• This AUTOSAR layer makes the upper software layer independent of the microcontroller unit by acting as an interface between them.
• These drivers are specific to the Microcontroller Unit.

Business Challenge

While developing our proprietary Body Electronics reference design, our development team realized the importance of making few of its modules AUTOSAR compliant. The body control module reference design was powered by a Renesas RH850 microcontroller; therefore, the process of AUTOSAR compliance had to begin with the creation of necessary MCAL drivers for the Renesas MCU platform.

These drivers were crucial for achieving reduced turnaround time for AUTOSAR projects where the customers wished to migrate their prototypes to a Renesas platform with full-fledged functionalities.
 

Embitel Solution

In the 1^st phase of AUTOSAR implementation, the AUTOSAR team took up the task of developing the MCAL drivers required for CAN communication. Our development team identified the MCAL drivers that were required for successful CAN communication. As CAN bus protocol is primary for inter-ECU communication, our team decided to build the MCAL drivers for CAN in the first phase.

The 5 AUTOSAR MCAL drivers that were taken up in the 1^st phase of AUTOSAR implementation are:

• General Purpose Timer (GPT): Performs timer count by using on-chip MCU timer
• Controller Area Network (CAN): Initializes CAN and performs CAN input and output
• Microcontroller Driver Specification: Accesses MCU power and clock unit
• Port Driver Specification: Initializes the whole port structure of the microcontroller and allows configuration of different functionality on each port and port pin
• DIO (digital input/output) Driver Specification: DIO drivers provide services for reading and writing to/from DIO channels, DIO ports and DIO channel groups

Embitel Impact

• Ready-to-integrate MCAL drivers can reduce time-to-market for AUTOSAR compliant automotive projects by 10-12 weeks.
• These MCAL drivers would also help our prospective customer migrate from an existing BCM prototype to a full-fledged BCM solution using our BCM reference design. Since the MCAL drivers are independent of the application layer, they can be easily ported for any kind of applications ranging from Powertrain, Motor Controller for Electric Vehicles, Infotainment system and more.
• More than 40% of the MCAL driver source code, requirements, test plans and work products can be re-used while migrating them to a different Microcontroller family such as NXP, TI, Fujitsu and others. This would also lead to reduced turnaround time for the customers.

Tools and Technologies

• Microcontroller: Renesas F1KH-D8
• Compiler: IAR Embedded Workbench IDE