Dynamic reconfigurable mixed-signal architecture for safety critical applications

Current trends show, it is increasingly difficult to manage the constraints of costs, power consumption, size and more than everything else, functional safety, with conventional architectures. This paper presents a new architecture to deal with the current and upcoming requirements in safety critical applications. It proposes the use of diverse redundancy with digital and analog channels, to detect random hardware failures as well as systematic failures. That will increase the functional safety. By exploiting the ability of dynamic and partial hardware reconfiguration of FPGA and FPAA and by using the appropriate failure recovery scenario, the system availability can also be increased. Furthermore, the architecture offers the possibility to combine high accuracy with short response time.