A functional suspension model is proposed as a kinematic describing function of the suspension, that represents the relative wheel displacement in polynomial form in terms of the vertical displacement of the wheel center and steering rack displacement. The relative velocity and acceleration of the wheel is represented in terms of first and second derivatives of the kinematic describing function. The system equations of motion for the full vehicle dynamic model are systematically derived by using velocity transformation method of multi-body dynamics. The comparison of test and simulation results demonstrates the validity of the proposed functional suspension modeling method. The model is computationally very efficient to achieve real-time simulation on TMS 320C6711 150 MHz DSP board of HILS (hardware-in-the-loop simulation) system for ECU (electronic control unit) evaluation of semi-active suspension.