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The migration of many vehicle security features from mechanical solutions (lock and key) to electronic-based systems (transponder and RF transceiver) has led to the need for purely electrically operated locking mechanisms. One such example is a steering column lock, which locks and unlocks the steering wheel movement via a reversible electric motor. The safety case for this system (in respect to ISO26262) is highly complex, as there is no single safe state of the steering column lock hardware because there is a wider system-level interlock required. The employed control platform uses ASIL D capable multicore microcontroller hardware, together with the first implementation of AutoSAR® version 4.0 operating system to demonstrate a real-world usage of the newly specified encapsulation and monitoring mechanisms using the multicore extensions of AutoSAR and those of PharOS.

With the advent of AUTOSAR version 4 and the availability of automotive specific multicore microcontrollers in volume production it is now possible to make very large scale integrations of different vehicle functions in a single ECU, running on a single high performance microcontroller. These microcontrollers typically provide all the hardware diagnostic mechanisms to achieve functional safety up to ISO 26262 ASILD, however careful consideration must be made in regard to the overall availability when undertaking large scale integrations in a single MCU. The motivation is clear. Up integration reduces costs, energy usage, wire harness complexity, and system bus traffic. However, when a multicore microcontroller is running different software for different applications on each of the available cores, if a fault is detected in one core the side effects and fault reactions must be contained, to prevent the fault propagating to other cores and applications.