How future automotive functional safety requirements will impact microprocessors design

Safety is one of the key issues of future automobile development. Car maker as well as suppliers need to prove that, despite increasing complexity, their electronic systems will deliver the required functionality safely and reliably. Future development and integration of these functionalities will even strengthen the need of safe system development processes and the possibility to provide evidence that all reasonable safety objectives are satisfied. Obviously with the trend of increasing complexity, there are increasing risks from systematic failures and random hardware faults that could impact negatively on vehicle safety. Safety relevant systems (such as advanced driving assistance and vehicle dynamic control units) require microcontrollers able to guarantee safety and availability with an acceptable cost. Safety must be achieved with respect to both systematic and hardware random faults, including soft-errors and common-cause failures. To provide availability, efficient and fast fault detection mechanisms shall be combined with infrastructures able to collect error events with enough details to allow reactions by the remaining hardware and the operating system. Costs shall be minimized by introducing as much robustness as needed and not more: this shall be done by avoiding unnecessary redundancies and reducing at the minimum the impact on system performances, therefore maximizing the usage of the available resources. This paper will give a short introduction on main concept of functional safety and ISO/DIS 26262, underlining the impact of such requirements on microprocessors and microcontrollers design. Some examples will be given on current approaches used to answer ISO/DIS 26262 requirements. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.