Implementation of Approach to Functional Safety Compliant Brushless DC Motor Control System

In this paper, a brushless DC (BLDC) motor control system is implemented to apply to an x-by-wire system based on ISO 26262 which is a functional safety standard for road vehicle. Recently, conventional mechanical and hydraulic systems are replaced by electric/electronic (E/E) systems to enhance the vehicle driving performance and safety. Particularly, because x-by-wire systems have the safety-critical functions, the reliability of the systems is needed to be improved by considering functional safety. For hardware and software requirement considered functional safety, electronic control unit (ECU) of the proposed BLOC motor control system has a microcontroller with an asymmetric dual-core architecture and an external watchdog. Functional safety oriented monitoring functions are implemented by using the ECU design and also verified by using hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS). The proposed system is very effective for detecting the software faults and mitigating the influence of the hardware failures with the functional safety compliant ECU.