Communication is the Base of Tomorrow's Highly Reliable Automotive Electronics 2002-01-0265

The general trend for redundancy concepts of safety critical automotive systems reflects a migration from the traditional doubling and tripling of all electronic components within an electronic control unit (ECU) to an inherent safe system design. This paper will explore the underlying requirements of this trend, and the resulting challenges for the electronic system design and the communication topology. Three major challenges have to be mastered: Communication, Distribution, and Concurrency. Infineons Failure Tolerant Deterministic Bus (FDA) protocol provides a major step stone to introduce new solution in the communication domain. Furthermore Infineons TriCore Microcontroller family includes major building block to solve the concurrence issue and enable such new safe and cost effective implementation of safety critical systems with a precisely scalable and matched redundancy.