Determined-Safe Faults Identification: A step towards ISO26262 hardware compliant designs

The development of Integrated Circuits for the Automotive sector imposes on major challenges. ISO26262 compliance, as part of this process, entails complex analysis for the evaluation of potential random hardware faults. This paper proposes a systematic approach to identify faults that do not disrupt safety-critical functionalities and consequently can be considered Safe. By deploying code coverage and Formal verification techniques, our methodology enables the classification of faults that are unclassified by other technologies, improving ISO26262 compliance. Our results, in combination with Fault Simulation, achieved a Diagnostic Coverage of 93% in a CAN Controller. These figures allow an initial assessment for an ASIL B configuration of the IP.