Safety - Critical Architectures for Automotive Applications

—Advances in embedded system technology have enabled automotive manufacturers to design electronic systems that introduce new features to the vehicles, improve their performance and increase safety. Following the successful use of fly-by-wire systems in aircraft, the introduction of drive-by-wire is expected in an increasing number of new vehicles. The electronic components used in these systems need to provide high levels of reliability and availability. This is achieved by using fault-tolerant techniques both in hardware and software design. Hardware fault-tolerance is based on the use of redundant components. The objective of this project is to design a fault-tolerant system-on-chip (SoC) architecture suitable for drive-by-wire and other safety-critical applications that will reduce the cost and component count in a fault-tolerant design, while maintaining the high levels of reliability and availability of the system.