Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a useful tool to aid in the detection and prevention of product defects. FMEA's are used throughout the automotive industry to facilitate the delivery of failure-averse modules to customers. This paper applies FMEA techniques to generic stand-alone Controller Area Network (CAN) chips. The CAN protocol, developed by ROBERT BOSCH GmbH, offers a comprehensive solution to managing communication between multiple CPUs.
Device-level FMEA's investigate the system-level impact of electrical abnormalities on a pin-by-pin basis. Conditions such as pins shorted to power or to other pins are evaluated for their effect on the system. Severity levels are also estimated.
An FMEA for generic stand-alone CAN devices must consider failure modes for various pin types: power, clock, clockout, interrupt, mode selection, CAN bus, I/O ports, and address/data bus. In addition, this paper discusses how CAN devices detect and respond to bus errors and explores how the system may utilize this information in an FMEA analysis.