Fault Tolerant Platform for Communication and Distance Measurement in Highly Automated Driving

The dream towards fully autonomous vehicles brings a lot of challenges in terms of reliability, high performance computing and sensing capabilities in a vehicle. Nowadays, autonomous vehicles are equipped with several sensors, which allow the vehicle to sense everything on the road and to collect the information needed to drive safely. Altogether, these sensors generate a lot of data, roughly 4TB in a single day [1]. In order to process this abundance of sensory data faster and reliably, there is a need for high performance microcontroller units (MCUs) and fault tolerant data processing respectively. For this reason, we have developed a smart reconfigurable sensor (SRS) platform, which aims to solve the challenges of high performance computing and safety. An in-house fabricated entire silicon-based millimeter-wave transceiver, using IHP's 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology, is used as SRS front-end and software (SW) based triple modular redundancy (TMR) system is implemented for fault tolerant radar data processing. Our highly adaptive system supports fault tolerant modes (i.e. fail operational, fail safe), low power mode and distributed execution of tasks among different cores, all while meeting the strict automotive standards.