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The increasing requirements for body features - for greater memory size and better controller performance on the one hand, and for energy consumption on power down on the other - make new concepts necessary. Higher performance and increasing features in semiconductor industries typically lead to the use of smaller structures. The latest structures being seen in automotive silicon devices are 0.18μ and 0.13μ. With these structures it is possible to achieve the requirements for performance and size of integrated memories. The drawback of these technologies is a dramatic increase of leakage currents, especially when such devices are getting hot. The paper will describe what can be done to get rid of such high leakage currents and how this was implemented in the latest 16/32 bit microcontroller family XC2000 from Infineon. There are two ways to get rid of leakage current.

Currently major investments by Tier1 and vehicle manufacturers are made to implement and optimize safety critical automotive systems according to the ISO standard 26262 “Road vehicles functional safety”. The ISO 26262 standard describes methods to detect the safety critical faults of a system designed according to the rules of functional safety, but it does not describe how an actual implementation shall look like. Development of ISO 26262 standard compliant systems concentrates on optimizing and improving cost and performance in a competitive environment. More competitive and practical implementations use fewer additional hardware and software resources for safety control and error detection and have higher performance with less overhead. Microcontrollers already have implemented many safety related hardware functions, so called safety mechanisms to mitigate safety critical risks.