ISO 13400 – Diagnostics over Internet Protocol (DoIP) at EB

1

History of the ISO 13400 (DoIP)

The United Nations (UN) initiated a worldwide legal standard for the onboard diagnostics of cars and trucks. The UN entrusted the International Organization for Standardization  (ISO) with the creation of this standard called WWH-OBD (World Wide Harmonized – Onboard Diagnostics). The goal of the standard WWH-OBD is to render the regional standards of vehicle diagnosis for emission control unnecessary and to replace them with a global standard.

A result of the UN’s efforts regarding the standard WWH-OBD was the decision to utilize the internet protocol (IP) for vehicle diagnostics, also known as Diagnostics over Internet Protocol (DoIP).

We have been part of the workgroup ISO 13400 since 1997. The German carmaker Audi has contracted us to help define this standard.

Automotive diagnostics via Ethernet (100 Mbit)

The goal of the ISO 13400 standard is the complete compability to the existing Ethernet standard. In the future, cars will integrate into corresponding infrastructures at the OEMs, similar to notebooks. Automotive OEMs are likely to utilize the synergies this new broad band communication interface offers, irrespective of the fact that the standard is has originally been pushed by law.

The amount of software embedded in the cars of today is growing rapidly. This increase is spurred by the constant advancements of functionalities provided by electronical systems in the automobile.

The time spent on the reprogramming (flashing) of automotive ECUs has already become a critical cost factor. The reprogramming is necessary to upload new applications to the electronic control unit during the manufacturing of the car or at the repair shop. The popular CAN bus offers a theoretical maximum capacity of 500 kb/s, making it a considerable bottleneck today.

We have already devised ways to allow OEMs’ specialist branches to reduce the time it takes to reprogram (flash) an ECU making use of Ethernet.

According to the members of the ISO workgroup, the cost of rolling out Ethernet in the automobile is outweighed by the potential economies through faster update reprogramming alone.

Tester/gateway architecture regarding Ethernet (DoIP) technology

The above figure depicts the architecture, both offboard (tester) as well as onboard (ECU). Those fields that are highlighted green show the building blocks we developed ourselves. In the area of the tester, these are the diagnostic framework we are currently building and the PDU-API, which renders the communication with an ECU possible. In the area of the ECU, we developed the IP stack (internet protocol stack), which some OEMs already employ in their mass-production cars.

Future developments for automotive ethernet solutions

In the wake of this leap in technology, we see a vast number of potential applications for expertise in the field of automotive Ethernet solutions. Various OEMs are already pondering the use of Ethernet as an automotive communication bus that links several ECUs directly. Effectively making the Ethernet bus a complement or even a replacement to the FlexRay and MOST bus. If you are considering the rollout of this new technology, we have the experts in the fields onboard and offboard to support your project.