An electronic control unit (ECU) for high pressure common rail system diesel engines based on Motorola MPC555 is introduced. Using high performance microcontroller MPC555 and adopting schemes of modularization the hardware and fundamental software of the electronic controled unit (ECU) were set up. The hardware is made up of the micro controled unit (MCU), power, input and the output module. The software includes that of initialization, sampling, and outputting module. With this ECU, experiments on rail pressure control and fuel quality at different pulse and rail pressure were carried out, and do some MAP studies on start of injection (SOI) and rail pressure on engine test bench. Experimental results proved that this system can obtain quite fine effects in control.