In all critical applications like aircrafts, medical equipment and automobiles, there is a requirement for the systems to be reliable and safe. These requirements are important since human lives are at stake, which have led to the development of safety standards in various industries. The basic idea behind functional safety is that the overall system should remain dependable, even in the event of an unplanned or unexpected occurrence. The ISO 26262: Road Vehicle Functional Safety (FuSa) standard is an international standard focusing on the safety of automotive electrical / electronic systems. The ISO standard provides recommendations from conceptual development to decommissioning of the product. The standard addresses faults resulting from Electrical/Electronic (E/E) systems malfunctioning and not due to fire, radiations, corrosions etc. These failures can be systematic failures (due to faults during development, manufacturing or maintenance) or random (during the life-time ) or malicious failures (deliberately injected).
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A Case Study
The checker and redundancy based safety mechanism had been implemented in a RISC-V based SoC. Such a safety critical system needs to have safety mechanisms everywhere. The SoC architecture diagram is given below.
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