The most difficult concept to grasp for most people is that remapping is merely engine tuning, albeit that it’s being done electronically rather than mechanically. A chip’ is simply an electronic storage devices or EPROM which is located on a circuit board inside the E.C.U (the Engine Control Unit). The chip contains values in a hexadecimal form which the E.C.U’S main processor (another device on the same circuit board) can understand and use and control the engine.
Each value inside the chip is held in its own separate position (known as ‘address’), and due to the way manufactures develop many engine on the same unit and to fix into tax bands, engines are detuned to fit into these bands and achieve the manufactures desired place into the market. As a result the car never performs as well as its mechanically controlled counterpart from the factory…
When a car is remapped, we are basically altering the values at the groups of addresses that control fuelling, ignition timing and on turbo engines, turbo boost, there are many other tables we change to allow for this to scale with systems that most other tuners miss whist they search for gimmicky trial solutions.
Naturally, this is a complex and skilled operation. It requires personnel who understand the hardware and software, and of course have the appropriate electronics qualifications in order to understand the procedures. Nowadays the technology is becoming even more complex. Gone are the days of the 28-pin plug in chip, a simple 8-bit device. We’ve experienced the occasional wake-up calls from chips soldered to the circuit board and with unusual sets of contents, and have now moved into territory which is definitely not for the faint hearted. Modern engines such as the V.A.G.1.8T and Audi TT have E.C.U’s with 16-pin, 44-pin devices, surface-mounted to the circuit board. Not just new hardware is on the outside but also some mind-boggling software is on the inside. Luckily, DNA’s engineers have kept abreast of the technology, and the company has invested heavily in state of the art de-soldering equipment, data logging and remapping software. We do not, therefore, have to rely on modern-downloads from any other source, all the DNA software is written here and you see the price saving according. |