Description
The race to self-driving cars is making the news almost daily. Legal, ethical and
legislative implications aside, this new market is an incredibly fast driver for the
evolution of SoC development for automotive applications. Advanced Driver Assistance
Systems (ADAS), the precursor of fully autonomous vehicles, led to an exponential
increase in the amount and complexity of electronics in cars. ADAS applications are
very computationally intensive and require advanced process nodes to meet the
performance/watt needs. Safety-critical automotive applications have stringent demands
for functional safety and reliability: these metrics are becoming an integral part of the
semiconductor design flow. The first part of the tutorial provides an overview of
functional safety and reliability requirements for automotive applications and it
introduces functional safety concepts as defined in the ISO 26262 standard to address
random and systematic failures: ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level), FMEDA
(Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis), Fault Classification and Tool
Confidence Level (TCL). It then describes how functional safety integrates and drives
the traditional design/verification/implementation flow for semiconductors. The second
part dives into a detailed FMEDA use case and provides an overview of safety
mechanisms typically required for different system components. Impact of failure modes
and failure modes distribution on overall system ASIL metric is also discussed. The
early FMEDA contains the diagnostic coverage values based on analysis, engineering
judgment and reference to ISO 26262-5. The tutorial details as, for the final FMEDA
release, the diagnostic coverage values are confirmed via safety verification, including
simulation with fault injection.