SHARC - Simulation and Verification of Hierarchical Embedded Microelectronic Systems

The modern automotive market is heading towards fully automated self-driving cars. Following this evolution, the amount of new assistance features for ensuring safe and reliable operations is rising, thus the design and verification of electric/electronic systems is becoming more and more complex. Simulation-based verification is key nowadays to test the reliability of a system, since the costs for physical tests cannot be handled anymore. Current tools and design flows hit the limits of complexity and therefore are not capable to efficiently address software and hardware design and optimization in a joint way. Furthermore, the technological, organizational and design gap in today's flows are not covered by current methods and tools. To cope with the high complexity in the integration of embedded systems, the use of advanced methods and design tools is more relevant than ever. In this work, we present a design, simulation and verification framework named SHARC. This framework allows an efficient verification of safety- critical networked embedded systems regarding functional safety (ISO 26262). Moreover, we achieve to merge a simulation-based approach, including virtual prototyping, with quantified reliability analysis without losing consistency.