Automotive ECU

About a couple of decades back there where very few cars plying on the Indian roads which had ECU's in them. This post provides a brief insight on these small units which crunch a horde of signals to make our vehicle smoother, faster and more efficient.

The Term ECU stands for Electronic Control Unit. The key terms here are Electronic and Control.

Electronic - This means the device is an electronic component. Typically, a ECU contains a Control Unit and more often than not it is a micro-controller (µC). However, in some modern vehicles ASIC and FPGA based solutions are also available. Apart from the µC there are  tons of peripheral hardware blocks which constitute to make the ECU's electronic hardware components.

Control  - This word describes the functionality of the ECU. It is often meant to control something. However, this is not always the case, but the term still seems to hold because of legacy reasons. In the vehicle one can classify the EU ( Electronic Units as i would call them) broadly into two categories.

1. Control Units - These control some functionality of the vehicle. E.g. Control the fuel going into your cylinders based on how much you push the gas pedal.
2. Information & Entertainment Units - These units provide vehicle information to the driver and also entertain the drivers. E.g. Navigation units, Car radio and Driver information system ( You can find one on the Mahindra Xylo)

On a after thought, I think we have one more category and this is a fairly new category. These are systems that help to interface different ECU's. E.g MOST-CAN gateway which is very common in high end cars.

There are lot of terms in this article which maybe jargon's for all newbies. However, I shall try to cover most of these Jargon's in future articles.

Coming back to the ECU...These days vehicles have as many as 90-100 ECU's (high-end) and about 8-9 (in mid and low end). The Tata Nano for example has a EMS which control's fuel and spark and ensures that the engine runs smoothly even under varing load conditions.

In the coming days, there will be more posts under automotive electronics (which is my area) and general embedded systems ( which some of my friends may add in!!).

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