A 28-nm Automotive Flash Microcontroller With Virtualization-Assisted Processor Supporting ISO26262 ASIL D

• Published in: IEEE journal of solid-state circuits Vol. 55; no. 1; pp. 133 - 144
• Main Authors: Kondo, Hiroyuki, Shimazaki, Yasuhisa, Ito, Masao, Uemura, Minoru, Hattori, Toshihiro, Sakamoto, Noriaki, Otani, Sugako, Otsuki, Norimasa, Suzuki, Yasufumi, Okumura, Naoto, Maeda, Shohei, Yanagita, Tomonori, Koike, Takao, Yayama, Kosuke
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Automotive electronics; Automotive engineering; Automotive MCU; built-in self-test (BIST); Central Processing Unit; Circuit reliability; Computer architecture; Electronic control; functional safety; Hardware; ISO26262; Microcontrollers; Microprocessors; multicore processor; Power consumption; Real time; Safety; Self tests; serial gigabit media independent interface (SGMII); Sleep; Transistors; Virtual environments; Virtual machine monitors; Virtualization
• ISSN: 0018-9200; 1558-173X
• DOI: 10.1109/JSSC.2019.2953826

In the autonomous driving era, automotive architecture has been rapidly progressing toward electronic control unit (ECU) integration and centralization. Advanced vehicle control is becoming increasingly important for safe driving. It requires microcontroller unit (MCU) integration, the highest automotive safety integrity level (ASIL), and network performance improvement. A 28-nm 600-MHz automotive flash MCU has been developed for next-generation automotive architecture. The MCU for vehicle control integrates three key features: a virtualization-assisted processor (VAP) for functional safety, a built-in self-test in the field (field-BIST) at a sleep resume (SR) BIST for functional safety, and a serial gigabit media independent interface (SGMII) for the in-vehicle network. The VAP helps the hypervisor to realize real-time virtualization to execute several different virtual machines without interference. The SR-BIST realizes random hardware failures per hour of 10 −8 in various automotive applications. In the SGMII circuit, we used 5-V transistors for high reliability despite their narrow bandwidth. The automotive MCU satisfies the ISO26262 ASIL D system requirements with a low power consumption of 0.52 W. The VAP can realize the severe automotive control hard real time capability.