3A Fault Tolerant Low Side Driver Circuit Design Using Design FMEA for Automotive Applications Electronic component is increasing in Automotive applications spanning from power train, connectivity, airbag, driver assistance, braking and more. Most of these components are Integrated Circuits that have to fulfill system safety requirements in sophisticated safety applications. A functional safety review and assessment are used to confirm whether integrated circuit component fulfills hardware safety and functional requirements derived from system safety goals. One such automotive safety system is the Airbag Control Unit with integrated Squib Drivers that deploys driver and passenger airbags when a valid car crash event is detected. Airbags are passive safety application, critical for driver and passenger safety that can be fatal if not deployed properly. Therefore, components used in airbag applications have to fulfill the highest system Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), ASILD. The safety critical part of Squib Driver Integrated Circuits is the High Side and Low Side powerFETs with its predrivers, control, monitoring, protection and diagnostics. This paper describes design Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) as one part of the systematic design methodology flow by using the low side current regulating driver as an example. This systematic approach resulted in a unique safety architecture that prevents inadvertent activation of the low side powerFET in the unpowered state of the driver. In the powered state, the current is regulated to 3A and is stable for inductances up to 3mH, a 30x higher inductive load than a traditional squib driver.

ISO 26262 ASILOriented Hardware Design Framework for SafetyCritical Automotive Systems In this paper, we base on the fault tree analysis (FTA) to propose an Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL)oriented hardware design framework for safetycritical automotive systems, where ASIL plays a key component in the ISO 26262 safety standard to measure risk of a specific system component. There are two contributions in this framework: FTAbased weakpoint analysis and ASILoriented faulttolerant design methodologies. The former can rapidly identify the weakpoints for safety through the fault tree analysis, and the latter can effectively introduce the safety mechanisms in the hardware design to fulfill the requirements of target ASIL. We use the autonomous emergency braking (AEB) system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design framework.