NXP S32K1xx serial MCU is widely used in automotive body control and many general-purpose automotive applications, while to target some applications with special requirements such as requiring more peripherals instance than the portfolio can offer (e.g. 6x CAN-FD, 6x LIN or 4 I2C) like mid-end BCM or DCU, an on-board dual/multi MCU sync solution is proposed as an alternate solution to extend the S32K1xx MCU peripherals/memory resource and CPU process capability.
The eRPC (Embedded Remote Procedure Call) is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) system created by NXP(https://github.com/EmbeddedRPC/erpc/). An RPC is a mechanism used to invoke a software routine on a remote system using a sample local function call.
Figure 1. eRPC software architecture
In this project, we ported the eRPC protocol to S32K1xx platform, tested and figured out its performance. An out-of-box software package with detailed user guide (this document) is provided to simplify and accelerate users’ assessment of eRPC on S32K1xx.
Two S32K144EVB boards are connected to demonstrate the usage of the eRPC protocol. One works as the client, another as the server. The client board starts an eRPC request and the server board responds to the request and executes the service.
Figure 2. eRPC task workflow on S32K144-EVB
There are three types of MCU extensions are demonstrated in the project:
- MCU IO extension: Set LED;
- MCU peripheral extension: CAN and LIN message forwarding, LED luminance regulator;
- CPU process capability extension: Matrix multiply and addition math operation.
Please find the attached sample projects and user guide for more details.
Figure 3. Table of Contents in User Guide
•Note: Even though we did a lot of tests for the solution with the sample projects on S32K144-EVB, it’s still customer’s responsibility to ensure the total quality by themselves when it’s integrated in a real application project, all the sample codes and user guide documentation are just reference for customer.
If you have any questions about this solution, please post here and we can have an open discussion.
Best Regard,
Enwei Hu(胡恩伟)
GPIS System Apps Engineer.
