A functional safety analysis approach for random hardware failure of automotive-grade chips
Bin Wei, Chao Heng, Cuiping Shao, Huiyun Li, Shunxian Gao · 2025
Automotive Grade Chips need to take into account the effects of unintended failures during operation, such as open circuits caused by chip aging or flipped memory devices caused by particle bombardment. Therefore, in the design process of automotive-grade chips, it is necessary to evaluate their safety and reliability. In this paper, we analyze the failure sources of automotive-grade chips and classify them according to the failure modes, comprehensively consider the impacts of different safety mechanisms, qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the functional safety of automotive-grade chips under transient failures, and quantify the level of protection against failures of automotive-grade chips under the transient failure conditions by means of mathematical models and evaluation indexes. The experimental results prove that it is feasible to evaluate the safety of the vehicle-grade chip through the functional safety analysis method at the design stage, and verify the protective effect of the safety mechanism of the chip on the vehicle-grade chip, which can guide the work of the vehicle-grade chip designers.