5 Challenges in Providing Automotive Functional Safety

Providing automotive Functional Safety is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of the interaction between hardware, software, and the physical environment. The semiconductor industry faces several challenges to make sure that the components the industry provides are safe and reliable.

One of the primary challenges is the need to make sure that the components can operate in a wide range of ambient conditions. Vehicles are exposed to a variety of environmental harshness, including temperature, humidity, and vibration. These environmental factors can impact the performance and reliability of the semiconductor components, making this crucial to confirm that the components can operate reliably under these conditions.

The complexity of modern vehicles also presents a significant challenge. Vehicles are becoming more and more interconnected, with multiple systems relying on each other to function properly. This creates a complex web of dependencies that must be carefully designed and managed to confirm that the system operates in a safe and reliable manner.

Another challenge is the need to make sure that the components can operate in a fail-safe manner. Fail-safe means that the system or function continues to operate in a safe manner even if a fault or error occurs. This requires fault detection mechanisms and the use of redundancy to confirm that the system can detect and respond to any faults that occur.

TI helps address these challenges by continuing to develop relevant products and by making all of the necessary data and documentation about these products available to enable their use in Functional Safety applications. For example, the TMAG5170D-Q1, is a dual-die, high-precision, linear 3D Hall-effect sensor, designed for a wide range of automotive safety critical position sensing applications. The two identical dies in one package enables the system integrator to utilize this fully-redundant 2-channel sensor architecture for the highest Functional Safety requirements. The TMAG5170D-Q1 offers multiple diagnostic features to detect and report both system and device-level failures which help to achieve ASIL D safety ratings for systems like e-shifter or Electric Power Steering (EPS). By using the redundancy feature of this high-performance 3D position sensor, the system integrator can achieve higher levels of safety and availability.