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The introduction of drive-by-wire systems into modern vehicles has generated new challenges for the designers of embedded systems. These systems, based primarily on microcontrollers, need to achieve very high levels of reliability and availability, but also have to satisfy the strict cost and packaging constraints of the automotive industry. Advances in VLSI technology have allowed the development of single-chip systems, but have also increased the rate of intermittent and transient faults that come as a result of the continuous shrinkage of the CMOS process feature size. This paper presents a low-cost, fault-tolerant system-on-chip architecture suitable for drive-by-wire and other safety-related applications, based on a triple-modular-redundancy configuration at the processor execution pipeline level.

This paper describes the use of electrical design analysis software to automate electrical design analysis techniques such as failure mode and effects analysis and sneak circuit analysis. It illustrates the type of reports that an automated electrical analysis can produce and compares them with those produced by an engineer unaided. The main advantage of the electrical design analysis software is that it significantly reduces the amount of effort needed to complete a competent design analysis report. This makes it possible to perform design analysis much earlier in the design process, at a stage where it is still relatively cost-effective to resolve problems.

MIRA is involved in a number of activities which are aimed at integrating electromagnetic modeling techniques into established CAD and CAE strategies used by automotive manufacturers and component suppliers for vehicle design. This paper describes the objectives of the work, the major activities and the progress to date. It includes a review of user requirements identified during earlier work, the results of the validation activities being undertaken and the progress with developing a strategy for integration of electromagnetic modeling into vehicle design processes. The results of a preliminary study into the use of high-performance computing are also reported.