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Automotive microcontroller users continually request devices with enhanced functionality and performance to integrate more features and to help meet increased government regulations. The use of standard (off-the-shelf) products to provide single-chip solutions to satisfy these requirements is quickly becoming more costly as integration requirements out pace process density improvements. However, multi-chip system solutions introduce concerns such as electromagnetic interference, more complex system validation, and printed circuit board (PCB) and component costs. Consequently, there is a need to take advantage of new technologies to partition system function while considering various constraints. To facilitate identifying current system partitioning trends and constraints, this paper examines five aspects of the microcontroller environment: CPU, memory, peripherals, networking and manufacturability.

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a useful tool to aid in the detection and prevention of product defects. FMEA's are used throughout the automotive industry to facilitate the delivery of failure-averse modules to customers. This paper applies FMEA techniques to generic stand-alone Controller Area Network (CAN) chips. The CAN protocol, developed by ROBERT BOSCH GmbH, offers a comprehensive solution to managing communication between multiple CPUs. Device-level FMEA's investigate the system-level impact of electrical abnormalities on a pin-by-pin basis. Conditions such as pins shorted to power or to other pins are evaluated for their effect on the system. Severity levels are also estimated. An FMEA for generic stand-alone CAN devices must consider failure modes for various pin types: power, clock, clockout, interrupt, mode selection, CAN bus, I/O ports, and address/data bus.

In-vehicle networks provide an efficient medium to share information between controllers, sensors and actuators. Networks may be comprised of subnetworks to support low, medium and high speed data-rate requirements or SAE CLASS A, B and C, respectively. These subnetworks can be linked using bridges or gateways to guarantee data consistency across the vehicle. This paper will describe a method to bridge an implementation of J1850, CLASS B to an implementation of the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol, CLASS C. The hardware and software elements of the bridge are discussed.