Functional Safety for Automotive Embedded Systems

Vehicles today are being equipped with an increasing number of embedded systems either to make them a lot safer for users or to provide enhanced user experience. This exponential growth of the embedded systems in cars puts forth the challenge to everyone involved in the development supply chain to ensure that the system is failsafe and foolproof. To address this issue, the concept of functional safety is introduced in the development of such embedded systems that go into an automobile. This whitepaper gives an overview of functional safety associated with automotive ADAS and infotainment systems and how Tier1s and OEMs benefit from it.

Some of the key aspects this whitepaper delves on include:

• The need for safer software
• Automotive software development process and phases
• Implementation of functional safety at each phase
• Introduction and illustration of Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL)
• Best practises in functional safety