Industry Expert Blogs

Functional safety, at varying degrees of integrity and with or without the ISO 26262, has become a cornerstone of SoCs in many key market segments, not just automotive. And the industry goal is to achieve these reliability levels without sacrificing any PPA and while continually reducing TTM. Go figure! I know, that’s like saying, make me an omelet without breaking eggs. And egg substitute is not an option. Jokes aside, in my opinion it is a challenging goal, but definitely not impossible.

One of the key IPs that has a direct impact on the SoC’s safety, security, coherency, bandwidth, latency and hence overall system performance is the interconnect. The interconnect is where all the various requirements melt into one cohesive IP, and the pressure is on to make that next leap and to boldly go where no NoC has gone before. Yep, I am referring to Star Trek. To this day, I am in awe of the futuristic vision which was way ahead of its time, but at the same time gelled with all the other human theatrics and requirements of making a great television series. That’s the kind of ingenuity required to meet the stringent needs of functional safety by integrating the state-of-the-art diagnostic features with the standard but stringent PPA requirements of the interconnect.

Let us start off by briefly reviewing the ISO 26262 requirements and then discuss what next generation interconnect capabilities are required to tackle these.

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