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The decentralized design environment that has become common practice in automotive electronics poses an especially difficult challenge to product design. Hardware and software teams may span both organizational and geographic boundaries. This makes it impractical to share a common laboratory facility for component testing and system integration. Simulation models can be shared across these boundaries but to serve as a prototyping alternative these simulations must model the hardware in detail and must execute the software. This paper presents such a virtual prototype using VHDL-AMS to model the hardware and to implement a micro-controller model that executes the software with accurate timing. An electronic throttle subsystem is simulated to demonstrate how the virtual prototype can be used to assess hardware/software interactions, verify compliance of the component designs with specifications, and optimize the trade-offs between numerical precision and software timing.

Accurate simulation model of Electronic Throttle Body (ETB) is important to engine control, system analysis and diagnosis. However, some model parameters could vary significantly due to temperature variation and harsh working environment, therefore are very difficult to calibrate in test. In this paper, an optimization of model parameters with genetic algorithm is implemented to match simulation with open loop step and impulse response test results to achieve a precise ETB model. Closed loop validation test with rapid prototyping tool is accomplished to confirm the accuracy of simulation model. This automatic parameter-refining modeling approach turns out to be an efficient way to achieve the required model accuracy, which utilizes the advantages of multi-software tool chain.