Gateways are used to interconnect electronic control units (ECU's) on various field buses. The primary function of a gateway is to seamlessly convert and merge telegrams and signals from one field bus and route them to a different field bus. The sending and receiving devices are completely unaware of the existence of the gateway; it appears as if they are directly connected to each other by their own bus. To reduce any influence on the devices this routing must be done in real-time. The different field buses may run with differing transfer rates (i.e. low-speed CAN and high-speed CAN) and may use different protocols, so one additional gateway task is to handle these items.

Gateways typically manifest themselves as a piece of software running within an ECU, and their complexity can range from homogeneous-speed CAN-to-CAN direct routers that simply copy and paste signals from one bus to the other, to multi-bus systems with multiple instances of CAN, FlexRay and LIN, and may include more complex networks such as MOST and Ethernet. Gateways have traditionally been developed by tier 1 ECU suppliers and purpose built for a very specific application with a static routing configuration.

CETITEC's Universal Gateway (UGW) has been developed to fit virtually any application, and possesses a few unique mechanisms to facilitate its use:

Bus-independent Gateway Core

The UGW uses a generic, bus independent Gateway Core component that is protocol agnostic. It contains the whole routing functionality of the UGW.

Bus-specific Fitters

The Core is connected through the use of bus specific Fitters to the different field buses. The UGW can be adapted to any application simply by adding the appropriate Fitter. For example, in a system that requires a gateway between CAN, FlexRay, and MOST, a CAN Fitter, CAN TP Fitter, FlexRay Fitter, and a MOST Fitter would be used to extend the Gateway Core.

MicroKernel

The UGW contains a MicroKernel that allows complex arithmetic transformation of signals.

Post-build Configurable Gateway Table

The UGW is post-build configurable through the use of a routing configuration inside a so called Gateway Table. This allows the gateway configuration to change throughout development and beyond without affecting validated ROM code.