Racing or performance chips, What are they?

Racing or performance chips are chips with programs that are similar to stock or factory programs, but slightly or moderately modified to optimize the performance of a given car’s stock engine or to accommodate mechanical modifications like boost, either Turbo or Supercharger or even the use of nitrous oxide for example.

Physical or electrical capabilities of a chip, like access time, though very important, don’t make a racing or performance chip to give more power to your car’s engine. What makes the power is the modifications made program wise on those chips’ memory.

These chips are one of various ways of “tuning” your car’s engine. Tuning the engine is making the necessary adjustments to the car computer’s program, either small or large, to make the engine give out the most power it is capable of.

When it is done to a stock car, it’s like doing a little more than a fine tuning, as the factory car computers come with generic programs developed and tested on a prototype vehicle and used in a complete line of vehicles without further testing.

On the other hand, when tuning is done to accommodate either minor or major mechanical modifications, it is major or complex tuning and sometimes it turns out to be a complete reprogramming or redesigning of the engine program, depending on the modification. An example of this is when a boost system is added to a naturally aspirated (NA) engine and changes have to be made so the engine can react to the extra intake pressure that otherwise it will not be aware of.

These electronic modifications are called chip tuning because the program to be changed is usually put on a chip in the car computer, though that is not always the case in modern ECUs.

You may be asking yourself, Why didn’t the manufacturers do this at first?

The answer is that dealers sell brand new cars with less engine power than they are capable of, because of several reasons. They are, emission standards, economy, security and durability (warranty).

One of the most powerful of those reasons is emission standards, because it is enforced by the Government and can not be just overlooked. If the vehicle doesn’t comply, it won’t ever hit the market.

Changes made on a chip

An exact copy of the program (software) inside the factory chip of a given car is read, using a device for this purpose. After the reading, an editor or “chip editor” made especially for the software inside the chip, is used to modify known sections of the software.

The modified areas include “Fuel Maps”, “Ignition Maps”, “Air Flow Maps (MAF)”, RPM limiters (Revlimiter), Vehicle Speed Limiters (Speed Governor) and some sensors like “Knock Sensors”, “Oxygen Sensors”, “Barometric Pressure Sensors” and “Manifold Absolute Pressure (MAP) Sensors”.

Also, the “Exhaust Gas Recirculation valve or “EGR” and “Variable Cam Timing and Lift” functions, are modified as needed.

The person who is trained and successfully makes all these changes to the car computer program is called a “Tuner”. The job is called either “Chiptuning”, “Tuning” or “Chipping”. A tuner must know what he or she is doing in order to “squeeze” the most power of an engine without endangering the engine’s life or the vehicle’s driver itself.

Protected Chips

Since the experimentation and development of good and effective racing chips takes a lot of time, effort and knowledge, and the means to do it are often very expensive and exclusive, performance chips are often protected to avoid illegal or unauthorized copies.

This illegal and immoral activity is being continuously done by people who want to do a few bucks out of other’s hard work and investments. This, not only is unethical, but hurts the market. Imagine of a group of people investing thousands of dollars developing a product and cutting costs the most they can, so the product can be sold at a competitive price. Now imagine the same product, being copied (stolen) by another people who haven’t invested a penny on the project, selling it at a small fraction of the price just to attract most of the buyers, because anyway the cost of the stolen product was very little or nothing.

To avoid the above situation, many chip developers have had to invest even in another product, which of course, will raise even more the product’s final price. That other product is the “anti-copy” socket in combination with an encrypted chip, to successfully protect the chip contents.

No-chip car computers

Some car computers don’t provide a factory or stock chip to be replaced, neither a spot where to install one. Also, most OBD-II cars (1996 and up), use different systems on their ecu and tuning is possible only by the diagnostic port or by replacing a soldered chip which is different in architecture, needing special tools for the job. In the first case, where no chip or spot is present, some groups have developed special adapters to successfully install an external chip, but nothing standard.

Thanks for reading,

Copyright www.technicaldomain.net

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