Heterogeneous Redundancy for PCB Track Failures: An Automotive Example

Reliability is a very important aspect in electronic components used in the Automotive industry. Due to the harsh environments in this industry, Printed Circuit Board (PCB) tracks are a very common cause of failure. This paper proposes a scheme that will increase the reliability of chip-to-chip interconnections. The scheme relies on the availability of unused microcontroller IO ports. It is shown how to implement a 1-out-of-2 (or even 1-out-of-3) fault-tolerant communication channel. To illustrate the advantage of the proposed scheme, communication channel reliability is calculated with and without fault tolerance and a use case indicates that the increase in reliability can be significant.