Controller maintains automotive system safety

With its built-in driver functions and complete monitoring system, the ATA6814 is a unique solution beneficial for all safety-relevant automotive electronics.

Atmel Corporation has developed a novel monolithically integrated fail-safe system IC, the ATA6814, manufactured using state-of-the-art 0.8um BCDMOS technology.

With its built-in driver functions and complete monitoring system, the ATA6814 is a unique solution beneficial for all safety-relevant automotive electronics, such as DC motor controls that can be found in electric parking brake systems, power steering, chassis and powertrains.

The ATA6814 combines various functions into one single IC, an improvement over competing solutions requiring the addition of several standard components such as stand-alone voltage regulators and watchdogs.

This leads to significant board space reduction and smaller, more cost-efficient designs.

The ATA6814 is ideally suited to safety-critical automotive applications, since the watchdog is completely separate from the system microcontroller and operates with its own dedicated oscillator, which in turn is monitored by a second oscillator.

The fail-safe system IC ATA6814 is highly integrated, including voltage regulators, driver stages, an SPI interface, as well as watchdog and monitoring functional blocks.

Two separate voltage regulators and band gaps enable high flexibility, while still maintaining a high safety level, thanks to the mutual monitoring.

Power consumption reduction down to 80uA in standby mode is achieved since one of the voltage regulators can be switched off.

The fully integrated, 250mA low-side relay drivers do not need any additional external circuitry and thus help to further save cost and space on the PC board.

The independent watchdog circuitry - the heart of the fail-safe concept - monitors the microcontroller's operation.

In addition, the monitoring function covers the battery voltage, all internally generated voltages, and the chip temperature in two stages, and it can disable the different IC blocks.

The fail-safe IC ATA6814 fulfills the requirements according to ISO/TR7637; in addition, all pins are protected against 2kV ESD (HBM).

The device can be operated within a wide ambient temperature range (from -40 up to +105C), and withstands load-dump pulses up to 45V.

Samples of the new fail-safe system IC ATA6814 in RoHS-compatible QFN48 (7 x 7mm) packages are available now.

Pricing starts at US $2.70 (10,000-off).

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