System level techniques to improve reliability in high power microcontrollers for automotive applications

In high power microcontrollers, a decrease in circuit lifetime is often observed in safetycritical applications where circuitry is subjected to the most severe stresses and reliability has become a major concern. Thus, ad-hoc design solutions become necessary to mitigate the impact of ageing. In this paper we discuss hardware-software approaches that exploit distributed on-chip monitoring of wear-out parameters to perform ageing-aware allocation of computation and recovery periods on the various computational units.