A flexible microcontroller architecture for fail-safe and fail-operational systems

Today, many life-critical types of equipment (such as Electronic Control Units of automotive systems) require microcontrollers able to guarantee safety and availability with an acceptable cost. Safety must be achieved with respect to both systematic and hardware random faults, including soft-errors and common-cause failures. To provide availability, efficient and fast fault detection mechanisms shall be combined with infrastructures able to collect error events with enough details to allow reactions by the remaining hardware and the operating system. Costs shall be minimized by introducing as much robustness as needed and not more: this shall be done by avoiding unnecessary redundancies and reducing at the minimum the impact on system performances, therefore maximizing the usage of the available resources. This paper describes a microcontroller architecture fulfilling those requirements. It describes as well the process with which the microcontroller has been specified, designed and analyzed (including fault injection), in accordance with functional safety norms like IEC 61508 and ISO 26262.

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