Date: Tuesday 25 March 2014
Time: 11:30 - 13:00
Location / Room: Konferenz 1

Chair:
Bart Vermeulen, NXP, NL

Co-Chair:
Sebastian Steinhorst, TUM-CREATE, SG

With the transition from hydraulic and mechanical automotive systems to electronic systems, the requirements on safety and energy efficiency are becoming increasingly important. The papers in this session address these issues by presenting robustness improvements at component and system level, advanced energy management at network level, and multi-variant design space exploration.

Time	Label	Presentation Title Authors
11:30	2.3.1	EMULATION-BASED ROBUSTNESS ASSESSMENT FOR AUTOMOTIVE SMART-POWER ICS Speakers: Manuel Harrant1, Thomas Nirmaier1, Jerome Kirscher1, Christoph Grimm2 and Georg Pelz1 1Infineon Technologies AG, DE; 2TU Kaiserslautern, DE Abstract In this paper we present a concept for assessing the robustness of automotive smart power ICs through lab measurements with respect to application variance and parameter spread. Classical compliance to the product specification, where only minimum and maximum values are defined, is not enough to assess device robustness since complex transients of application components cannot be defined within single specification parameters. That is why application fitness becomes a necessary task to reduce device failures, which may occur in the application. One solution would be to enhance traditional lab verification methods with a concept that considers application and parameter spread. This innovative concept is demonstrated on an electronic throttle control application. It has been emulated in real-time, including power amplification and application-relevant parameters. Within this application space, Monte Carlo experiments were carried out to evaluate the influence of parameter spread on selected system characteristics. Finally, an appropriate metric was used to quantify the robustness of the micro-electronic device within its application.
12:00	2.3.2	STARTUP ERROR DETECTION AND CONTAINMENT TO IMPROVE THE ROBUSTNESS OF HYBRID FLEXRAY NETWORKS Speakers: Alexander Kordes1, Bart Vermeulen2, Abhijit Deb2 and Michael Wahl1 1University of Siegen, DE; 2NXP Semiconductors, NL Abstract The research and development on in-vehicle networks (IVNs) is driven by two main requirements: bandwidth and robustness. In this paper we address the robustness requirement. We focus on FlexRay IVNs that are used for safety-critical applications. We analyze and discuss faults that may affect the startup and operation of a FlexRay network. These failures may not only occur during the startup phase of the vehicle, but they may also happen due to a bus problem that requires the bus to be reinitialized during normal operation. Here any startup failure leads to a critical situation like a brake system failure. The fault scenarios we discuss in this paper are the resetting leading coldstart node (RLCN), the deaf coldstart node (DCN), and the babbling idiot (BI). These faults are described in literature, but neither the precise behavior of all involved nodes, nor a clear solution is provided to contain their impact. The idea of a bus guardian (BG) is given in a draft specification of the FlexRay consortium, but no details are given. In this paper, we extend on these ideas by investigating and implementing a detailed (BG) concept, based on our fault analysis. We subsequently evaluate the successful containment of the three fault types in simulation. We also quantify the chip area cost of our solution.
12:30	2.3.3	A SELF-PROPAGATING WAKEUP MECHANISM FOR POINT-TO-POINT NETWORKS WITH PARTIAL NETWORK SUPPORT Speakers: Jan Reinke Seyler1, Thilo Streichert1, Juri Warkentin1, Matthias Spägele1, Michael Glaß2 and Jürgen Teich2 1Daimler AG, DE; 2University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, DE Abstract As a result of the increased demand for bandwidth, current automotive networks are getting more heterogeneous. New technologies like Ethernet as a packet-switched point-to-point network are introduced. Nevertheless, the requirements on stand-by power consumption and short activation times are still the same as for existing field buses. Ethernet does not provide wakeup mechanisms that are sufficient for automotive systems. As a remedy, this paper introduces a novel physical-layer mechanism called Low Frequency Wakeup that is largely independent of the communication technology and topology used. It provides parallel and remote wakeup for all nodes even in a point-to-point network as well as full support of partial networking. The overall wakeup detection time is smaller than 10 ms and every node can actively feed a wakeup signal asynchronously to all other nodes. In terms of latency, it is shown that Low Frequency Wakeup reaches a reduction of more than 30 % for a three-hop network and more than 50 % for a five-hop network in comparison to the current state-of-the-art technology for automotive point-to-point networks.
12:45	2.3.4	MULTI-VARIANT-BASED DESIGN SPACE EXPLORATION FOR AUTOMOTIVE EMBEDDED SYSTEMS Speakers: Sebastian Graf1, Michael Glaß1, Jürgen Teich1 and Christoph Lauer2 1University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, DE; 2AUDI AG Ingolstadt, DE Abstract This paper proposes a novel design method for modern automotive electrical and electronic (E/E) architecture component platforms. The addressed challenge is to derive an optimized component platform termed Baukasten where components, i.e., different manifestations of Electronic Control Units (ECUs), are reused across different car configurations, models, or even OEM companies. The proposed approach derives an efficient graph-based exploration model from defined functional variants. From this, a novel symbolic formulation of multi-variant resource allocation, task binding, and message routing serves as input for a state-of-the-art hybrid optimization technique to derive the individual architecture for each functional variant and the resulting Baukasten at once. For the first time, this enables a concurrent analysis and optimization of individual variants and the Baukasten. Given each manifestation of a component in the Baukasten induces production, storage, and maintenance overhead, we particularly investigate the trade-off between the number of different hardware variants and other established design objectives like monetary cost. We apply the proposed technique to a real-world automotive use case, i.e., a subsystem within the safety domain, to illustrate the advantages of the multi-variant-based design space exploration approach.
13:00	IP1-1, 417	SAFE: SECURITY-AWARE FLEXRAY SCHEDULING ENGINE Speakers: Gang Han1, Haibo Zeng2, Yaping Li3 and Wenhua Dou1 1National University of Defense Technology, CN; 2McGill University, CA; 3The Chinese University of Hong Kong, CN Abstract In this paper, we propose SAFE (Security Aware FlexRay scheduling Engine), to provide a problem definition and a design framework for FlexRay static segment schedule to address the new challenge on security. From a high level specification of the application, the architecture and communication middleware are synthesized to satisfy security requirements, in addition to extensibility, costs, and end-to-end latencies. The proposed design process is applied to two industrial case studies consisting of a set of active safety functions and an X-by-wire system respectively.
13:01	IP1-2, 459	TRANSIENT ERRORS RESILIENCY ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE FOR AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY CRITICAL APPLICATIONS Speakers: Sujan Pandey and Bart Vermeulen, NXP Semiconductors, NL Abstract When a single bit is flipped as a result of a transient error in an electronic circuit, its effect can have a severe impact if the circuit is deployed in safety critical domains such as automotive, aeronautics, and industrial automation. In the design phase it is therefore essential to evaluate, and where necessary improve, the resilience of a circuit to all possible transient errors. In this paper, we present a method to analyze the transient error resiliency of a digital circuit. This method is based on an analytical model. It models a transient error as a random function and finds the vulnerable number of bits for each node. We perform a case study on a circuit implementation of a well-known adaptive filter algorithm. The results from the analytical and simulation models show that the analytical model is accurate enough to estimate the effects of transient errors on the performance of a digital circuit. Our analytical method also reduces the run time significantly in a design phase.
13:00		End of session Lunch Break in Exhibition Area Sandwich lunch