OEM & Lieferant - Ausgabe 1/2021

82 IT and Automotive Calibrating ECUs was possible even before INCA V1.0 was introduced – but it certainly wasn’t simple or efficient. From today’s per- spective, the operation of INCA’s MS-DOS- based predecessor VS100 seems almost absurd. Performing measurement and calibra- tion in parallel was impossible. This made the work very time-consuming. Graphics capabil- ities were also very limited. But 1997 marked the start of a new era in ECU development with the launch of INCA V1.0. By taking full advantage of the computing power available at the time, INCA V1.0 finally enabled developers to perform this parallel operation. This significantly boosted the efficiency of ECU development. The soft- ware also offered numerous other benefits: INCA V1.0 allowed calibration engineers and developers to rapidly process much larger quantities of measurement data. They could focus their work on the exact parameters they chose. What’s more, the software was compatible with ECUs from many different vendors. This gave automakers greater flex- ibility in selecting components and consider- ably facilitated their collaboration with ECU manufacturers and other suppliers. INCA had established itself as a major force in ECU de- velopment – a position it continues to hold today. Expanding INCA to meet new requirements Stricter emission standards and steadily in- creasing complexity have always been the drivers behind ECU development. Nowadays, it is standard to have an ECU network with a multitude of function areas and mutually de- pendent parameters. Whenever one variable is changed, this has an impact across thewhole network. As the years have passed, this has placed significantly greater demands on INCA. Yet this steady increase in requirements has also led to INCA becoming increasingly powerful. INCA’s success since 1997 in establishing itself as an industry-standard tool for ECU calibra- tion largely comes down to ETAS software de- velopers. By putting themselves in the shoes of calibration engineers and developers and understanding their tasks in detail, they are able to offer them appropriate solutions. The focus has always been on the user – as the following overview shows: •  Data export and import features to simplify collaboration between colleagues were introduced in INCA V2.0. This version also included the database concept that enables users to store experiments and hardware configurations and then reuse them for a range of development tasks. •  The workspace concept introduced in ver- sion 3.0, whichwas released in the year 2000, combined the experiment, hardware config- uration, and ECU project into an INCA work- space element. This made it much easier for users to work with the artefacts and clearly track the dependencies between them. It also allowed newly created workspaces and experiments to be reused in other develop- ment tasks. •  Launched in 2002, version 4.0 was the first to offer the function of calculated signals based on available measured values – a ma- jor advantage for certain tasks, for example helping to identify a specific ECU behavior and subsequently analyze it. This version Transforming a vision into success A journey through the history of INCA By Jörg Herrmann, INCA Project Manager, ETAS GmbH, and Kilian Schnellbacher, INCA Lead Product Manager, ETAS GmbH On April 17, 1997, ETAS launched a new product: INCA V1.0. The developers’ vision – a tool for ECU calibration that could be used by any automaker in the world – must initially have seemed like an unattainable dream. Today, this vision has been more than realized. Yet there is still more to be done, with technical innovations and the future of the automobile posing new challenges for developers on a daily basis. S H A R E Images: © ETAS GmbH