Germany’s Bosch Motorsport is using Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable devices in its latest High Efficiency Logic (HEL) engine control unit (ECU) processing core. The HEL-based ECUs are plugged into the LMP1 race cars of a German OEM participating in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC). The performance and robustness of the Zynq SoC-based Bosch-ECU enabled the race team to get onto the podium multiple times.
The HEL-based ECU is responsible for the complete diesel engine management including multi-point injection and pressure control. Besides collecting engine data, the ECU also provides functions like the pit row speed limiter and traction control. A Xilinx Zynq-7020 All Programmable system-on-chip (SoC) with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system acts as the brain of the ECU.
Whereas most control algorithms are running sequentially on the ARM cores, the programmable logic part of the Zynq device is used for parallel acquisition of the engine data and interfacing to other subsystems via pulse-width modulation (PWM), RS-232, LIN, CAN or Ethernet, real-time critical signal-processing, and I/O controls.