Fault Impact Assessment for Automotive Smart Power Products in an Electric Power Steering Application

The paper presents a methodology to propagate the consequences of random hardware faults in automotive smart power products to the application level. To accomplish this, the random hardware faults on chip level are assessed through fault injection into circuit simulations and are collapsed to come up with the relevant fault modes of a certain chip block. Then, these fault modes are propagated to the application level by injecting them into application simulations. The above is accomplished in an automated, seamless flow, which supports the engineering judgment in safety analysis by simulation results. The viability of the proposed approach is shown along a real-life example application (electric power steering) and a related smart power function (current measurement in the three phases). 1