19. Network-on-Chip Based Multiple-Core Centralized ECUs for Safety-Critical Automotive Applications

Current automotive electronic systems contain many ECUs (Electronic Control Units), and many of them play very important roles for safety-critical applications. However, in conventional ECU configurations, each ECU is usually tied to specific functions, and is connected to specific sensors/actuators. Thus, failure of an ECU directly leads to loss of the function related to the ECU. A centralized ECU approach has potential to resolve these issues. In this configuration, since any ECU can access any intelligent sensor/actuator and each function can be executed by any ECU, a faulty ECU no longer results in malfunction of specific functions that are assigned to it. This chapter introduces a dependable NoC (Network-on-Chip) platform that is suitable for a centralized ECU. In this platform, asynchronous design style is used to design on-/off-chip network to handle delay faults or process and other variations. Especially, for achieving the performance compatibility between on-/off-chip data transmissions, current-mode circuitry is applied. For mitigating router or link faults, a dependable routing algorithm is adopted. Finally, its dependable task execution scheme makes the platform function correctly so long as the capability of surviving processor core faults permits. The outcome of this research project has formed into an evaluation platform that includes a hardware board, a support tool for the dependable task execution scheme, and a functionality of hardware-in-the-loop simulation using a built-in plant model (please refer to Sect. 19.5 for details).