DSPACE GmbH
DSPACE (Digital Signal Processing And Control Engineering ) is a German company with headquarters in Paderborn (Nordrhein- Westfalen) and a global provider of development tools for control devices.
The company has branches in Munich and Stuttgart, as well as subsidiaries in the U.S., UK, France, Japan and China. In other foreign markets dSPACE is represented by various distributors.
Areas of application
DSPACE offers tools to develop, test and calibration of control devices in the automotive and aerospace industries as well as in the field of industrial automation (mechatronics ) are used. The development and testing process for electronic control units (ECUs: Electronic Control Units ) is based in most cases on the so-called V- model. dSPACE covers with its hardware and software from four of the five process steps, the controller design is left out.
Controller design
The area controller design is concerned with the development of control algorithms to be executed on the control unit. The graphical modeling of these algorithms can, for example, with the modeling tool Simulink from The MathWorks are carried out and is out of the scope of the dSPACE tools.
Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP )
With Rapid Control Prototyping can control algorithms from one model to implement out as a real-time application to test this in the real system. As the editing and simulation tool is used Simulink Coder Simulink as code generator MathWorks. dSPACE is supplying the hardware platform consisting of processor and interfaces for sensors and actuators, as well as the appropriate Simulink blocks for the integration of these interfaces in the Simulink model (Real -Time Interface RTI).
Production Code Generation / ECU autocoding
In model-based development process automatic code generators are used to standardize graphically specified function models directly into code for production ECUs / Controller. For this purpose, the generator must transfer the validated model behavior reliably to a destination processor whose resources are designed to cost-effectively as a rule, that is, the series controller is usually a smaller memory capacity and a lower processing power than the RCP system on which developed the algorithm and was tested. Therefore, high demands are made in terms of maturity and efficiency of the C code or serial code to automatically create. dSPACE offers since 1999 a production code generator TargetLink under the product, which is integrated into the model-based development environment Simulink. Besides the actual code generation ( for AUTOSAR software components) enables TargetLink also comparing the behavior of the generated code with the original Simulink model ( Software-in- the-loop ( SIL) and processor-in -the-loop ( PIL) simulation).
Hardware-in -the-loop (HIL ) simulation
In the HIL simulation, a control unit is connected to a simulator, which simulates the functional environment of the controller. This can be a car, an airplane, a robot or something similar. For this, the inputs and outputs of the controller are connected to the outputs and inputs of the simulator. The simulator then runs a real-time model of this working environment, for example, Automotive Simulation Models (ASM ) from dSPACE or third party suppliers. In this way, new functions can be reproducibly tested in a safe environment, before the advent of a prototype of the product exists. Again Simulink models serve as a basis.
The great advantage of HIL simulation compared to the testing of ECUs with real prototype vehicles is that these tests can be carried out in the development process very early and found errors earlier and thus eliminates cost-effective.
Application / calibration / parameterization
An integral part of Steuergeräte-/Reglerentwicklung is the optimization of control functions for specific applications. This is done by adjusting the parameters to control devices - the so-called ECU calibration. dSPACE offers for these tasks software and hardware.