Advanced Electronic Solutions for Highly Dependable Systems

This paper will discuss advances in electronic component technology that has been developed specifically for failsafe and fault-tolerant automotive systems such as braking and chassis control systems. These systems need to be highly dependable, and exhibit predictable behavior in the event of a system fault.

Such systems often perform many real-time self-checking operations to detect the occurrence of a fault. Integrated on-chip hardware can be used in such systems to help ensure that the dependable system can provide a ‘fail-safe’ operating mode. There are many different configurations of hardware used in such embedded systems to realize the fail-safe methodology, each having its own unique characteristics in terms of fault coverage, costs, complexity and performance. Hardware implementations, as opposed to software plausibility checks by a watchdog, are often advantageous and require less systems development effort. This paper will discuss such on-chip systems that lead to optimized ‘fail-safe’ microcontrollers.