Study the Effect of Soft Errors on FlexRay-Based Automotive Systems

FlexRay, as a communication protocol for automotive control systems, is developed to fulfill the increasing demand on the electronic control units for implementing systems with higher safety and more comfort. In this work, we study the impact of radiation-induced soft errors on FlexRay-based steer-by-wire system. We injected the soft errors into general purpose register set of FlexRay nodes to identify the most critical registers, the failure modes of the steer-by-wire system, and measure the probability distribution of failure modes when an error occurs in the register file.

Authors:

• Yung-Yuan Chen
• Kuen-Long Leu

Keywords:

• Soft errors
• FlexRay
• fault injection
• steer-by-wirer

References:

[1] R. Makowitz and C. Temple, "FlexRay - A communication network for
automotive control systems," IEEE Int. Workshop on Factory
Communication Systems, Page(s):207 - 212, June 2006.
[2] C. Constantinescu, "Impact of deep submicron technology on
dependability of VLSI circuits," Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Dependable
Systems and Networks, pp. 205-209, 2002.
[3] R. Baumann, "Soft errors in advanced computer systems," IEEE Design
& Test of Computers, vol. 22, issue 3, pp. 258 - 266, May-June 2005.
[4] Y. Zorian et al., "Impact of soft error challenge on SoC design," Proc.
11th IEEE Int. On-Line Testing Symposium, pp. 63 - 68, 2005.
[5] IEC 61508: Functional safety of electrical/electronic/ programmable
electronic safety-related systems, International Electro-technical
Commission IEC, 1998.
[6] S. Brown, "Overview of IEC 61508 design of
electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems,"
Computing & Control Engineering Journal, pp. 6-12, February 2000.
[7] ISO 26262: Road vehicles - functional safety, November 2011.
[8] A. H. Mollah, "Application of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA)
for Process Risk Assessment," BioProcess International, pp. 12-20,
November 2005.
[9] M. Stamatelatos et al., Fault Tree Handbook with Aerospace
Applications, version 1.1, NASA, 2002.
[10] FlexRay Consortium, "FlexRay Communications System - Protocol
Specification," v2.1 Revision A, December 2005.
[11] Y. Kai et al., "Optimum Design and Calculation of Ackerman Steering
Trapezium," Int. Conf. on Intelligent Computation Technology and
Automation, pp. 1248-1252, 2008.