Displaying posts in the categoryEmbedded Systems
Embedded Systems articles
Tutorials
Automotive electronics work as one control loop: sensors measure what is happening in and around the car, microcontrollers and processors decide what to do, vehicle networks carry the data and commands, and actuators and power electronics carry out the decision. In an electric vehicle the same electronics also convert and manage the energy that moves the car. No single part is useful on its own; reliability comes from designing the whole chain t…
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The Editor's Desk
October 26, 2026
Video
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of IEEE 802.1 standards that make standard Ethernet deterministic. It gives every device a shared sense of time, schedules time-critical traffic into reserved windows, lets urgent frames interrupt long ones, and can send critical streams over two paths at once. The result is bounded latency, low jitter and high reliability, so control traffic and ordinary data can share one network in cars, factories and …
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 17, 2026
Tutorials
An automotive Edge ECU (Electronic Control Unit) is a controller placed at the edge of a vehicle's network, close to the sensors and actuators it serves, that processes data locally instead of sending everything raw to a central computer. It is usually part of a zonal or distributed architecture. By handling time-critical functions on the spot and sending only results upstream, it cuts latency and network load, at the cost of more local comp…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 16, 2025
Interfaces and Protocols
A zonal ECU (Electronic Control Unit) is a controller that looks after every electrical function in one physical zone of a vehicle, such as the front left corner, the rear or the cabin, whatever domain those functions belong to. Instead of one ECU for the engine, another for lighting and another for body comfort, a zonal ECU gathers the sensors, actuators and loads in its area, connects them to a central computer over a high-speed backbone such …
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 16, 2025
Technology
An automotive microcontroller (MCU) is a single chip with a processor, on-chip flash and RAM, and peripherals such as ADCs, timers, PWM and CAN or LIN controllers, built to run one control job in a vehicle reliably for fifteen years or more. MCUs sit inside nearly every electronic control unit (ECU), from seat motors and window lifts to brakes, airbags, battery management and motor inverters. What sets them apart from consumer chips is functiona…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 19, 2025
Interview Questions
The average RPM for the whole trip is 48 RPM, not 50. The motor turns the same number of revolutions in each direction, but it spends longer on the slow reverse leg, so the average must be weighted by time. Divide the total revolutions by the total time and you get the harmonic mean of 60 and 40, which is 48 RPM. Key takeaways Average speed is always total quantity divided by total time, never the plain average of two speeds. When equal a…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 03, 2025
Top10
A software-defined vehicle (SDV) is a car whose features are set mainly by software running on a small number of powerful computers, and which keeps gaining or changing features through over-the-air updates after it is sold. Designing one is hard because it combines the scale of a large software project with the safety, security, cost and lifetime demands of automotive hardware. The ten challenges below cover software development, cybersecurity,…
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 03, 2024
Signal Processing
The top applications of FPGAs are signal processing, wireless and telecom infrastructure, networking, data centre acceleration (including AI inference), cryptography, aerospace and defence, automotive, industrial control, medical imaging, and test and measurement. What these have in common is a need for high, predictable throughput and low latency, combined with volumes too low or requirements too changeable to justify a custom ASIC. Below are…
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 14, 2023
