4.5 A 16nm FinFET heterogeneous nona-core SoC complying with ISO26262 ASIL-B: Achieving 10−7 random hardware failures per hour reliability

The role of car information systems (commonly referred to as car infotainment) is expanding from dedicated navigation systems to joint car-cockpit systems, including the dashboard meter, telematics for the internet/cloud, and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs), such as adaptive cruise control and a pre-crash safety system. The expanding role for car information systems requires higher computational performance, but also safety mechanisms which prevent serious accidents. This paper presents an SoC for the next generation of car infotainment, achieving high performance powered by nine heterogeneous CPUs and a high level of safety, complying with ISO26262 ASIL-B. It has two key features: 1) Run-time test for functional safety, which can detect wear-out faults, such as random fault, time-dependent dielectric breakdown, and electromigration; 2) A killer-droop (critical voltage droop) monitor with droop prediction, which can avoid a delay fault caused by voltage droop.