As consumer demand for safer, smarter, and highly connected vehicles continues to grow, the automotive industry is undergoing rapid changes. At the same time, the rise of autonomous driving, electric vehicles, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) has significantly increased the overall complexity of automotive systems. The industry must address these new safety challenges while ensuring a high-quality driving experience and the safety of end users.
What is Functional Safety?
Functional safety is crucial for ensuring that systems operate correctly in response to inputs, especially in the automotive and industrial IoT sectors. It plays an important role in reducing residual risks by adopting rigorous processes and standards. This mechanism ensures that systems can operate safely under various conditions, including preventing unacceptable risks due to failures in the vehicle’s electronic and electrical (E/E) systems.
The goal of functional safety is to ensure that vehicles can correctly process input information to prevent failures and ensure passenger safety. To achieve this, the following key principles must be followed to build functional safety products in the automotive industry.
Primary Considerations for Automotive Functional Safety
Building the Right Safety Design
When constructing a safety design for a product, strict safety requirements and objectives must be met to reduce potential hazards. Key design considerations include implementing redundancy, diversity, software testing libraries (STL) execution, and safety state design to ensure system reliability. Arm’s latest Automotive Enhanced (AE) product portfolio offers scalable and customizable solutions to meet specific safety requirements.
Compliance with Standards
Products based on targeted solutions must comply with relevant regulations and safety standards. For example, ADAS solutions should adhere to UNECE GSR and standards such as ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and ISO 21434 to ensure the interrelation between functional safety and information security.
From the perspective of Arm AE products, compliance with ISO 26262 standards is crucial for automotive lifecycle safety and is the cornerstone of supporting partner solutions. Arm’s safety-ready solutions are designed with a “safety-first” approach, combining advanced safety mechanisms and comprehensive safety packages to help partners meet ISO 26262 standards.
Risk Management
To build a functional safety system, risk analysis must be conducted at the vehicle level to perform hazard analysis and risk assessment (HARA) and failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA). These system analysis tools help develop robust systems and components, some of which are particularly critical for Arm AE processors, including the Arm Cortex-A and Cortex-R series processors.
Verification and Validation
Rigorous testing is essential, including hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulations. To achieve this, Arm and its partners actively build virtual platforms to start software development early, thereby shortening the development cycle and ensuring scalable redeployment across various vehicle models.
Vendor Management
Efficient communication between OEMs and tier-one suppliers is crucial. The Arm ecosystem encompasses collaborations with automotive industry leaders, ensuring all parties can smoothly access the necessary tools, resources, and expertise for effective vendor management.
Lifecycle Management
Implementing a safety culture and continuous improvement processes is essential for maintaining high safety standards. Arm Flexible Access solutions enable OEMs and tier-one suppliers to assess different IP computing platforms in a cost-effective manner, allowing for more informed choices of system-on-chip (SoC) offerings from suppliers.
Documentation and Traceability
Maintaining comprehensive documentation and ensuring the traceability of safety requirements is key. Through Arm’s partner program, Arm provides extensive support and helps achieve functional safety compliance through industry-leading safety solutions to support the Arm AE product portfolio.
Choosing the Right Technology for the Right Use Case
Functional safety requirements vary by use case. Autonomous driving systems require achieving ASIL D integrity levels, while systems with lower criticality may only need to meet ASIL B levels. Arm Reference Design RD-1 AE (Arm Reference Design-1 AE) for the automotive sector provides high-performance Arm Neoverse V3AE CPUs and Cortex-R82AE-based safety islands for additional safety monitoring. The Cortex-R82AE processor meets ASIL D requirements and offers high reliability.
Choosing the right technology is extremely necessary. Arm provides customized computing solutions tailored to different safety needs. Cortex-R processors are designed for safety islands and real-time automotive applications, while Cortex-A processors can handle complex computing tasks, such as autonomous driving functionalities utilizing multicore, lockstep, and mixed modes.
The Important Role of Software
Software is crucial for optimizing functional safety in the automotive industry and ensuring an excellent driving experience. Arm STL provides comprehensive testing and validation tools to enhance the safety of automotive applications. These libraries help developers ensure their software meets the stringent safety standards of the automotive industry.
Arm’s Functional Safety Runtime System (FuSa RTS) is a set of certified software components that reduce the time and effort required to achieve final safety certification in various embedded applications. This system includes a robust real-time operating system (RTOS), an independent processor abstraction layer, and a highly optimized and validated C language code library specifically for Cortex-M processors by Arm architecture experts. It is optimized for native use with functional safety compilers and Arm’s embedded toolchain Arm Keil MDK.
Additionally, Arm relies on a vast partner ecosystem (including SOAFEE members) to build functional safety and automotive safety software applications. SOAFEE (Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge) is an initiative led by Arm that combines the automotive and software industries to make AI software-defined vehicles a reality. SOAFEE creates a new ecosystem of software solutions that supports chip development and deployment processes through software consistency, which is crucial for the upcoming Arm Automotive Computing Subsystem (CSS) set to launch in 2025.
Arm’s Platform: The Cornerstone of Future Automotive Safety
As the automotive industry continues to innovate, the importance of functional safety will only increase. The new Arm AE processors, based on the Armv9 architecture, bring server-level performance and advanced safety features to automotive applications, ensuring that future vehicles can meet the growing demands for automation and connectivity. Arm AE processors are flexible and efficient, improving the efficiency of safety-critical computing tasks by up to 30%, laying a solid foundation for future automotive innovations.
For over 30 years, Arm has been a trusted leader in safety computing within the automotive industry. The Arm AE product portfolio provides Arm’s partners with a rich set of options, whether the positioning of different processing units in the solution is to achieve ASIL B levels or to possess complete ASIL D functionality. Furthermore, with a robust ecosystem, Arm is building full-stack software solutions running on the latest Arm AE products, covering numerous automotive applications, including zonal control, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), ADAS, and autonomous driving systems (ADS). Combined with Arm’s supporting software (including STL and SystemReady), a wide range of functional safety features can be achieved, optimizing performance, power consumption, and area (PPA) for the safety functions required by automotive computing systems. With a powerful combination of software and hardware innovations, Arm’s platform will safeguard automotive safety now and in the future.