Elastic Gateway Functional Safety Architecture and Deployment: A Case Study

Abstract

The automotive industry has started its transformation towards Software-Defined Vehicles. This transformation is driven by the rise of the number of vehicle features, the high complexity of these features and their constraining availability requirements which affect all the players (Original Equipment Manufacturers, Tier1 and Tier2) of the sector. In the context of this transformation, our target, from functional safety point of view, is to, inter alia, provide an easy-to-use and safety-compliant execution and development flow and simplify the development and argumentation for safety by providing a) a pre-certified execution environment with safety design patterns and best-in-class safety measures and b) processes and tooling to minimize the system integrator's effort. Therefore, in this work we propose a top-down approach where we first define a New Generation In-Vehicle Network, NGIVN, capable of fulfilling the performance (e.g. high bandwidth, low end-2-end delay), safety-related availability (e.g. Autonomous Driving/Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (AD/ADAS) up to SAE level 5) and safety requirements of modern vehicles. Also, we illustrate the advantages of this approach by deriving the functional and safety attributes of an Automotive Gateway SoC, named Elastic Gateway and destined to be part of the NGIVN. Through the deployment of the Elastic Gateway functional safety concept we demonstrate the flexibility provided by our approach with regards to the design of elements of the NGIVN.