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The automotive industry is undergoing a rapid transformation, with connectivity and automation becoming integral components of modern vehicles. However, this increased connectivity also brings heightened risks. The automotive industry takes many measures to ensure safety for vehicles, but it is crucial to understand that these safety measures are ineffective if the vehicle's security is compromised. A hacked car can render virtually any safety mechanism useless, posing significant risks to passengers and other road users. Therefore, ensuring both safety and security is paramount in modern automotive design.

As vehicles become more automated with many features and applications delivered through powerful compute platforms, there is need for more security and higher data bandwidth with low latency, requirements that exceed by far the capability of legacy in-vehicle communication protocols. This has opened the door for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) type technology. Some specific applications driving this are: 

• High-resolution sensing that drives the needs for supporting higher data rates between sensors and the centralized processor.
• Heterogenous computing / AI that needs to allocate different computing tasks to associated compute cores.
• 360-degree perceptions that needs more automation in order to leverage sensors covering the entire environment in the car.

These are among the requirements fueling the rapidly growing adoption of PCIe as an interface for the automotive industry, based on its ability to meet the high-performance, scalability, and interoperability needs of modern vehicles.

²ÝÁñÉçÇø' PCIe IP solutions for automotive applications incorporate a range of safety mechanisms to align with the ISO 26262 standard, ASIL B level, to protect against permanent and transient faults that can occur unpredictably during the lifetime of an automotive system. The ISO 26262 safety mechanisms incorporated in ²ÝÁñÉçÇø' PCIe IP solutions include:

• Safety AUX - Dual Rail Architecture: Two separate power rails are used to ensure redundancy. The Safety Monitor checks these rails for parity to detect any inconsistencies.
• Comparators - Self-Checking: Comparators used in the system are designed to perform self-checks to ensure they are functioning correctly, enhancing fault detection capabilities.
• Safety Monitor Registers - Parity Protected: Registers used by the Safety Monitor are protected with parity bits, allowing for the detection of single-bit errors.
• Safety State Machines ¨C One-Hot-State Machines: One-hot-state machines are used to ensure that only one state is active at a time, simplifying error detection and improving reliability.
• Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB) - Parity Protected: The APB is protected with parity bits to detect single-bit errors during data transfers.
• Diagnostic Error Injection - Supported via Software: The system supports diagnostic error injection through software, allowing for the testing and validation of safety mechanisms by simulating faults.
• Error Correction Code (ECC) Error Injection - Supported via Software: Error injection for ECC is supported via software, enabling the simulation of errors to test the system's error correction capabilities.
• Processing Monitor - for timing events: The Processing Monitor detects additional processing lock-up errors, enhancing the safety fault detectability for any PCIe transfer type.
• Logic Built-In Self-Test (LBIST) - External, Mandatory at Boot: External LBIST is mandatory to run at boot time to verify the integrity of the logic circuits, ensuring that they are free from faults.

²ÝÁñÉçÇø provides extensive safety documentation for its PCIe 5.0 controller with IDE security, which is indispensable for achieving ISO 26262 compliance, ASIL D level, to protect against systematic faults that can occur during the development process. The documentation ensures regulatory adherence, enhances traceability, aids in risk management, supports continuous improvement, and facilitates stakeholder communication. ²ÝÁñÉçÇø provides amongst others:

• Quality Manual
• Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA)
• Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA)
• Safety Manual
• Dependent Fault Analysis (DFA)
• Safety Case Report
• ISO 26262 Assessment Report