Making Microcontrollers Fault Robust

In the automotive market, semiconductor technologies and electronic systems are converging into a "car-in-a-chip" design. This deep integration results in a new population of fault models: modeling uncertainty, functional verification holes, specification misunderstanding, EMC, crosstalk, unforeseen interactions and misuse, soft-errors and malicious accesses. These problems are faced in other safety-critical electronic systems such as biomedics and aerospace, securesystems, or where a high availability is a key function, such as gateways and routers. This article gives an overview of the design challenges and fundamentals of making these systems more robust. It also introduces fault Robust, a platform-based approach that achieves robustness in adherence to IEC61508 with limited HW and SW costs.