Automotive safety critical systems: Advanced fault injection methods

Advanced Fault Injection Methods for Automotive Safety Critical Systems

Safety is one of the biggest concerns of the automotive industry. Releasing a product with defects that could compromise safety can have enormous direct and indirect cost for an automotive OEM. Moreover, the new ISO 26262 standard is imposing more demanding requirements to the industry in order to increase the quality of safety critical systems. Fault-tolerance hardware and software mechanisms (e.g. redundancy, monitoring, diagnostics, recovery, etc) are often combined and used together in order to improve safety. Those mechanisms have to be tested on the system context under all operational conditions and corner cases. Typical corner cases very difficult to test are those produced when the underlying hardware fails or the software gets unexpectedly corrupted. Fault injection methods are typically used to cover a subset of these tests, however there are quite some limitations on how effectively existing methods can be applied for a more extensive coverage.

In this webinar, Continental will describe the importance of fault-tolerance mechanism and fault injection techniques for Automotive Tier-1's using an Electronic Stability Control system as an example. Hardware fault-tolerance mechanisms available in state-of-the-art MPC5643L microcontroller units will be introduced by Freescale. Synopsys will disclose how virtual prototyping technology can be used to overcome many of the limitations of existing fault injection techniques. Realistic fault injection scenarios will be shown using a Freescale lock-step dual core virtual MCU model.

This webinar is presented by Synopsys, Inc., Freescale Semiconductor and Continental Teves AG & Co. OHG