Navigating The Intersection Of Safety And Security


Automotive IC safety and security continue to be hot topics across the industry, and one phrase you may often hear during discussion is: An automotive IC can be secure without needing to be safe, but an automotive IC cannot be safe without also being secure. Adding a bit of detail to that: An automotive IC which has an incomplete security architecture provides potential attack vectors w... » read more

Automotive Safety: Having The Right Product Portfolio In Place


Changes are happening in almost every aspect of automotive technology, although the main thrust can be encompassed in three megatrends. In the future, vehicles will be increasingly connected, and therefore cybersecurity protection is becoming more and more important. e-mobility will be a major contributor to CO2 reduction, resulting in the need for high-power semiconductors. And automated drivi... » read more

Is A Guestimate Good Enough For Obtaining Failure Mode Distribution?


SoCs targeting automotive applications are required to meet certain safety and quality standards as described in ISO 26262. A quantitative approach to safety analysis involves performing Failure Mode Effects and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA). FMEDA is a systematic quantitative analysis technique to obtain subsystem/product level failure rates, failure modes and diagnostic capabilities of systemat... » read more

Scaling Processor Performance And Safety To Meet Requirements For Next-Generation Safety-Critical Automotive Designs


This white paper proposes a state-of-the-art processor architecture targeting automotive safety systems that meets the requirements of such active safety systems delivering the required processing performance, providing the highest automotive safety integrity level (ASIL) while also significantly contributing to a reduction in overall cost of the systems through the use of artificial neural net... » read more

GPIOs: Critical IP For Functional Safety Applications


The prevalence and complexity of electronics and software (EE systems) in automotive applications are increasing with every new generation of car. The critical functions within the system on a chip (SoC) involve hardware and software that perform automotive-related signal communication at high data rates to and from the components off-chip. Every SoC includes general purpose IOs (GPIOs) on its ... » read more

Auto Displays: Bigger, Brighter, More Numerous


Displays are rapidly becoming more critical to the central brains in automobiles, accelerating the adoption and evolution of this technology to handle multiple types of audio, visual, and other data traffic coming into and flowing throughout the vehicle. These changes are having a broad impact on the entire design-through-manufacturing flow for display chip architectures. In the past, these ... » read more

Making Autonomous Driver Chips Safe From The Top Down


It’s easy to think of electronics applications in which the chips must be ultra-safe: nuclear power plants, aircraft, weapons systems, and implanted medical devices. Autonomous vehicles, capable of self-driving with only the electronics in control, are rapidly emerging to join this list. These vehicles must be “safe” in all the usual colloquial ways, but they also must meet a very specifi... » read more

Three Steps To ISO 26262 Fault Campaign Closure


The complexity of automotive ICs continues to grow exponentially, challenging even the most veteran teams to deliver innovative products to market while simultaneously ensuring safety through the operational life of the product. This is the purpose of safety verification. Its primary objective is to understand whether the safety architecture sufficiently prevents random failures from violati... » read more

Automotive Test Moves In-System


With the electrification of automobiles, it’s not enough to test the new electronics thoroughly at the end of the manufacturing process. Safety standards now require that tests be performed live, in the field, with contingency plans should a test fail. “We see clear demand from the automotive semiconductor supply chain for design functionality specifically aimed at in-system monitoring,�... » read more

Automotive Functional Safety Compliance In EDA Tools And IP


By Swami Venkat and Meirav Nitzan A modern vehicle can boast as many as 100 million lines of code—that’s more than the Large Hadron Collider (50 million lines) and Facebook (62 million lines). On the hardware side, many of today’s cars have upwards of 100 electronic control units (ECUs) to run various functions. As automotive engineering ingenuity continues to drive further innovation ... » read more

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