Using Built-In Self-Test Hardware to Satisfy ISO 26262 Safety Requirements

Whitepaper Overview 

Semiconductor content in today’s vehicles is growing rapidly. Soon, electronics is expected to exceed 50% of the total vehicle cost. A growing proportion of the modern-day automotive electronics are there to support new advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) like lane departure assist, collision avoidance, and other self-driving features. The demands of safety-critical ADAS systems introduce new challenges to semiconductor designers in meeting functional safety requirements defined by the ISO 26262 standard.

The ISO 26262 standard defines the levels of functional safety, known as Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), and is a mandatory part of an automotive system design process. Achieving the required ASIL level for a given function requires extensive simulation of potential random faults that could occur within the design and impact its safe function. This fault simulation process is similar to the fault simulation process that has already been used for years within the design-for-test (DFT) domain. However, in the context of functional safety, not all faults are equal and this leads to differences between our DFT metrics and our functional safety metrics. There has been no easy way to align the two different metrics.

In this whitepaper from Mentor, a Siemens Business, learn about how traditional DFT technologies can be leveraged to meet the ISO 26262 functional safety requirements.