Saverio Pezzini

Fault-tolerant platforms for automotive safety-critical applications

Fault-tolerant electronic sub-systems are becoming a standard requirement in the automotive industrial sector as electronics becomes pervasive in present cars. We address the issue of fault tolerant chip architectures for automotive applications. We begin by reviewing fault-tolerant architectures commonly used in other industrial domains where fault-tolerant electronics has been a must for a number of years, e.g., the aircraft manufacturing industrial sector. We then proceed to investigate how these architecture could be implemented on a single chip and we compare them with a metric that combines traditional terms such as cost, performance and fault coverage with flexibility, i.e. the ability of adapting to changing requirements and capturing a wide range of applications, an emerging criterion for platform design. Finally, we describe in some details a cost effective dual lock-step platform that can be used as a single fail-operational unit or as two fail-silent channels trading fault-tolerance for performance.

Multi Processor Micro-Controllers for Automotive Safety-Critical Applications

Abstract Fault-tolerant electronic sub-systems are becoming a standard requirement as electronics becomes more and more pervasive in present cars. To master the increasing complexity of these devices a new design flow has to be put in place, which enables a tight interaction among system companies and system integrators. In this paper we present multi-processor micro-controller architectures devised within the Platform-Based Design framework to address fault-tolerant automotive applications.