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Technical Paper

Program Overlay Mechanism for Engine Control Module

2010-10-06
2010-36-0157
As the complexity and size of algorithms dedicated to EMS continually grows more hardware resources, like processing speed and memory are demanded, increasing the cost of the final product (ECUs in this case). This paper presents a technique aimed at saving flash memory space by pulling pieces of executable binary code out of the microprocessor's flash area and storing them in an external device like an EEPROM. When the application needs to execute that piece of code stored at EEPROM, it will request it to be downloaded into an available RAM memory area and run it from there. For such it is required that some sort of allocation technique be applied once the RAM size is by far much smaller than the EEPROM storage device's size meaning that the whole content of EEPROM cannot be downloaded single shot into RAM. It happens to be necessary a strategy to break the flash application code down in smaller pieces to be stored at EEPROM.
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