Reliable Fail Operational Multicore Microcontrollers for Metaverse Enabled Autonomous Vehicles

Among the wide variety of application fields that will benefit from metaverse tools, the autonomous vehicles' one stands for the offered potentials. In fact, metaverse tools may for instance enable an accurate evaluation and prediction of changing environmental conditions, that might otherwise put at risk driving safety. Multicore micro controllers will be needed to perform the high performance and real time computations mandated by autonomous vehicles enabled by metaverse tools. They are also currently embedded within autonomous vehicles. The Dual Core Lockstep (DCLS) technique is frequently employed to guarantee the on-line test of faults possibly affecting one of the cores. However, the DCLS technique does not provide in itself fail operational ability, which is instead required to exploit the potentials offered by metaverse tools to increase the level of autonomy of current autonomous vehicles. Based on these considerations, we here propose a BIST based diagnosis and reconfiguration strategy that, upon the generation of an error message by the comparator of a DCLS system, at first runs BIST based self-test of both cores to diagnose which one of the two cores is faulty, to then properly reconfigure the system to maintain the functionality of the fault-free core, thus guaranteeing the fail operational ability of the DCLS system.