Electronic Control Units
In the Concept Car, since sensors and actuators are used to interact with the environment, signal processing is necessary in order to provide data to and from the system. The Sensorboards and the Actorboard are small ECUs for direct interaction with sensors and actors. They all feature an 8-Bit AT90CAN128 microcontroller [Atm08] with 128kB ROM and 4kB RAM running at 16MHz, utilizing the same CAN transceiver chip (PCA082).
Although the 8-Bit AT90CAN128 nearly reach one instruction per clock cycle, these microcontrollers are not suited for any computation-intense tasks due to their 8-Bit architecture Therefore, the Controlboard with its 32-Bit ARM7 (AT91SAM7A2) microcontroller is designed for those tasks.
The following Sections describe the ECUs of the Concept Car.
