"Novel Hardware Verification Techniques for Electric Vehicles".

Nowadays vehicles are embedding more complex functionalities, reason for which, the demand of Electronic Control Units able to perform safety-relevant tasks is increased. It leads the automotive industry to find novel verification and validation methodologies act to improve the quality of the assessment. The ISO26262:2018 automotive functional safety standard requires to follows a strict development process, compliant with its “safety lifecycle”. It provides a guideline for all the phases of the item life, in particular for the hardware/software integration validation, since usually the software is in charge to mitigate the effects of some possible hardware failures. This thesis proposes a novel technique to aid the designers to perform the Failure Mode, Effect, and Diagnostic Analysis of hardware designs. In particular, it has been considered the case of a power electronics module to be embedded in an electric vehicle powertrain. I performed some tests on the benchmark application, with a simple mitigation algorithm and the approach has demonstrated itself able to provide results useful to aid the functional safety engineers. Because of the strong coupling between the failures of the item and the vehicle behaviour, I have approached a structured way to motivate the classification based on the simulation results.