A 16 nm FinFET Heterogeneous Nona-Core SoC Supporting ISO26262 ASIL B Standard

Abstract

It is getting mandatory to comply with ISO26262 in the recent automotive development. The implementation of safety mechanism to detect faults is one of the keys in ISO26262. The fault prediction will make the automotive system more reliable. The SoC in this paper introduces two features: hardware built-in self-test (BIST) for safety mechanism supporting automotive safety integrity level (ASIL) B and killer-droop monitor for fault prediction. In addition, time slicing is introduced to the testing with hardware BIST during runtime so that each test session can be shorter than the required interrupt response time in the application. The killer-droop monitor can predict the voltage droop and stop the clock supply for a certain period of time to mitigate the droop for preventing delay faults on the SoC. The monitor samples the voltage based on time-to-digital converter at CPU operation clock and predicts the voltage from the history of sampled voltage. With that prediction feature, the minimum operation voltage can be improved by 50 mV at 2.02 GHz CPU operation, and the maximum frequency can be improved by 140 MHz under 0.82 V power supply in 16 nm process.