eCAL Toolbox for Simulink

Highly complex electronic control units (ECUs) with increased communication needs in today’s vehicles pose a challenge during development and prototyping. Different types of ECUs based on different development platforms must interact and exchange large amounts of data in real time.

This situation is particularly relevant for ADAS and autonomous systems where a flexible, light, and performant means of communication is necessary. Continental R&D developed a specific middleware solution to run AD software components on a wide range of hardware platforms, which can be implemented in different computing languages.

eCAL (enhanced Communication Abstraction Layer) enables scalable, high performance interprocess communication in heterogenous networks. It is based on a publish/subscribe pattern, designed for minimal latency and high data throughput, and leverages UDP or shared memory as the transport layer for best performance. Thanks to its lightweight C/C++ API, eCAL has been integrated into Simulink^® as an open-source toolbox for simulation on desktop and for prototyping on Speedgoat^® real-time target computers, providing a flexible and highly performant multi-node communication layer.