SemiWiki: What are SOTIF and Fail-Operational and Does This Affect You?

by Madelyn Miller, On May 22, 2019

What are SOTIF and Fail-Operational and Does This Affect You?

May 22nd, 2019 – By Bernard Murphy

Standards committees, the military and governmental organizations are drawn to acronyms as moths are drawn to a flame, though few of them seem overly concerned with the elegance or memorability of these handles. One such example is SOTIF – Safety of the Intended Function – more formally known as ISO/PAS 21448. This is a follow-on to the more familiar ISO 26262.

When you’re zipping down a busy freeway at 70mph and a safety-critical function misbehaves, traditional corrective actions (e.g., reset the SoC) are far too clumsy and may even compound the danger. You need something the industry calls “fail operational”, an architecture in which the consequences of a failure can be safely mitigated, possibly with somewhat degraded support in a fallback state, allowing for the car to get to the side of the road and/or for the failing system to be restored to a working state. According to Kurt Shuler (Arteris VP of marketing and an ISO 26262 working group member), a good explanation of this concept is covered in ISO 26262:2018 Part 10 (chapter 12, clauses 12.1 to 12.3). The system-level details of how the car should handle failures of this type are decided by the auto OEMs (and perhaps tier 1s) and the consequences can reach all the way down into SoC design. Importantly, there are capabilities at the SoC-level that can be implemented to help enable fail operational.

For more information, please visit the Arteris IP AI package webpage: http://www.arteris.com/flexnoc-ai-package

To read the entire article, please click here: https://semiwiki.com/automotive/8159-what-are-sotif-and-fail-operational-and-does-this-affect-you/
 

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