Fault tolerant automotive systems: an overview

There is a trend in the automobile industry for an increasing number of safety-related electronic systems in vehicles that are directly responsible for active and passive vehicle safety. These applications will increase overall vehicle safety by liberating the driver from routine tasks and assisting the driver to find solutions in critical situations. Thus it is of the utmost importance to solve fault tolerance issues of the electronic systems themselves. This paper gives an overview of the strategies and structures employed in the automotive environment to assure a good degree of fault tolerance both for complete systems and for integrated circuits