Customization Offerings
ElectroJet has a standard portfolio of ECU products and throttle body packaging to offer to general market customers. If these products do not fit the particular needs of a customer, we are fully capable of semi-custom of full custom designs.
Semi-custom designs usually leverage existing packaging but incorporate a customized ECU to suit specific features, functions, and needs of our customers. The sky is the limit for full custom designs. ElectroJet designs all packaging, electronic hardware, and develops all software in house. Provide us with your specification and we will propose costs, timelines, and milestones for your development project. If you don’t have a specification, we can help you through the process of developing a specification to suit your specific application.
ECU Development
ElectroJet develops electronic control units (ECU) with two separate design philosophies, depending upon the genesis of the ECU development project. One philosophy applies to ECU development projects that are originated by ElectroJet, when we have identified a unique market segment that requires a new ECU to adequately service. The other philosophy applies to ECU development projects that are originated by our customers, when they have identified cause to develop a semi-custom or full-custom ECU for their application. Regardless of the design philosophy, ElectroJet delivers the target product at the target price meeting all functional requirements of the system.
When an ECU development project originates within ElectroJet, we target broad market appeal. From a feature perspective, we will design an ECU that is applicable to as many existing production applications as possible within the pertinent market segments. From an environmental perspective, we will design the ECU so it is compatible with the harshest application within this segment, in terms of ambient temperatures, altitudes, and sealing requirements. To ensure the ECU meets the quality standards required by certain customers, only electronic components certified to the appropriate AEC standard will be employed in the design. In order to ensure maximum applicability for future semi-customization options, we will select microcontrollers and other smart semiconductors that have scalable memory, performance, and temperature grades. Following this approach, we are able to design ECUs that meet the needs of any customer in our target segment, while providing maximum cost savings, even to low volume customers, through broad market scale of the ECU.
When a customer wishes to engage in a semi-custom or full-custom ECU development on an application specific basis, we are flexible to meet the requirements of their application. Some customers do not require the use of AEC qualified components, allowing us to create a design with lower cost non-automotive grade components. Additionally, certain applications do not require a wide temperature range certification for the ECU, so we are able to employ lower cost semiconductors that operate safely across a narrower temperature band. Finally, certain customers do not require stringent environmental sealing for the final ECU package. In these cases, it is possible to use lower cost connection systems to interface to the ECU, eliminating substantial cost from the system.
Regardless of the design path that is right for your company, ElectroJet’s flexible approach to software development will ensure a unified calibration experience, no matter which hardware platform the software is executing on.
Packaging
Most of ElectroJet’s products can be described as an “Engine Management Throttle Body” or EMTB, where the ECU is physically mounted to the throttle body itself. In this configuration the ElectroJet products usually match the packaging shape of common carburetor sizes including matching all mounting hardware. Because of this design philosophy, the ElectroJet products are very easy to apply to engines that are currently carbureted. Large or small, we have existing throttle bodies to match many common sizes in the market today.
Although the physical packaging of the throttle body can vary in size, all throttle bodies use the same ECU package geometry and a common interface to the ECU. This reduces overall cost of the product and reduces the expense to develop new or customized packaging solutions. Once a customer has made the investment to apply ElectroJet products to one of their engines, the costs to migrate EFI to new engine types is very low and limited specifically to the costs of new packaging designs and calibration efforts. Overall, the more engines a customer has, the lower the total cost of development is to their organization.
The ElectroJet ECU meets IP69k sealing standards with the appropriate mating connector. This standard means that the system is able to handle very unfriendly environmental conditions for dust, is sealed against water ingress, and can even stand up to being pressure washed.
Although our products are very diverse in package size, sometimes customers just want their products to be different. ElectroJet can offer customers fully customized packaging solutions for engine control products. If you desire remote mounted ECUs or require specialized environmental packages for your project, we are able to meet your needs promptly at low cost.
Software Development
We have two primary design goals when we develop software at ElectroJet. First, we want to deliver a unified software experience to the calibration development engineers, regardless of the ElectroJet hardware platform they are using. This ensures our customers get the most from their engineering resource investment in developing with ElectroJet products by ensuring these experiences accumulate to result in truly reusable system expertise. Second, we want our software to be portable to any microcontroller without subjecting the overall application to decreased execution speed or increased memory consumption. This goal ensures that we are developing software that can be easily migrated to next generation microcontrollers to reduce overall ECU cost, while preventing software quality issues that typically emerge in the migration process.
Our ability to meet these goals begins with our strict adherence to an intelligently layered design, which consists of three software layers. This process begins with the development of the low level device drivers for the microcontroller. This layer of software is completely dependent on the microcontroller, and it is the only layer that must be substantially modified for our software to execute on a new device. The device drivers interface with our operating system layer, which provides required time bases for task execution, diagnostic and communication services, and support for calibration memory management. The operating system layer completely encapsulates the device driver layer, allowing the operating system to interface with the final layer, the application layer, in a uniform way, regardless of the hardware platform. This ensures that our application software layer, which implements the engine control functionality that your calibration development team will experience, remains completely unmodified when we migrate our software to new hardware platforms.
Though high level text-based programming languages offer a great deal of portability, it is an unavoidable reality that these languages must be modified slightly to extract the maximum performance from each microcontroller the software executes on. As a result, if ElectroJet were to develop its application software in a text-based language, it would be nearly impossible to migrate to new microcontrollers, while extracting maximum performance and minimum memory consumption.
To avoid this shortcoming, we utilize ETAS ASCET to develop our application software, which allows us to capture our control features in an easy to understand graphical format. From these graphical application models, ASCET auto-generates MISRA compliant text-based software that is optimized for the microcontroller in the target ECU. With this powerful infrastructure in place, we are able to generate ECU-optimized software for any of our ECU products from one ASCET model without changing a single functional aspect of the model. Not only does this reduce the effort and cost associated with developing software for new ECUs, but it also drives substantially improved software quality, as we are simply redeploying proven control algorithms and allowing the computer to remove human error from the process.
In addition to improving the flexibility and quality of our software, ASCET also helps you calibrate our ECUs in a clear and efficient manner. Unlike text based programming languages, ASCET can be understood by engineers that have very limited exposure to software development. Functionality is captured in a variety of engineering-friendly formats, such as state machines, block diagrams, and conditional tables. ElectroJet takes these models and distills the information into robust documentation organized by control feature. This allows any calibration development engineer to quickly locate measurable variables and calibratable parameters, while understanding how they work in the software. Finally, since ASCET generates both the executable software and the A2L file required for calibration, there are reduced opportunities for mismatches between feature documentation and software executing in the ECU.
Catalyst Development
Electronic fuel injection provides many benefits for our customers including the ability to meet stringent new emissions standards. Many applications benefit from combining a catalyst technology with EFI technology to meet Low CO, Euro4 emissions, or other strict emissions standards.
ElectroJet has experience with catalyst development to meet specific emissions levels and the process to validate and certify product on a global basis. We have customers that are able to produce their products and ship to global markets, meeting all emissions standards and performance metrics around the world.
When contemplating catalyst development, consideration should be provided for the physical packaging of a catalyst, emissions levels required, engine degradation factors, and budgetary constraints. ElectroJet can assist in the development of a catalyst and maturation of the engine
calibration to maximize the value of these devices. ElectroJet is capable of supplying catalysts to our customers, but we do not manufacture catalysts in-house. Our strength comes from our knowledge base, experience, and expertise in navigating customers through the development process to meet their specific goals.
Testing
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Module level testing -
Validation of electronic hardware and packaging solutions -
Rigorous standards from the automotive industry -
Provide a spec for testing or leverage automotive standards -
Engine level testing in customer applications