Infineon: Implementing Functionally Safe designs for the EV market through an efficient and reliable P&R flow

The automotive EV industry requires chip designs operating reliably at high voltages, while ensuring functional safety. Reliability involves adding redundancy of safety-critical logic physically separated on-chip, and an accurate battery pack monitoring to enable the system to cut-off current in the case of an accident. Infineon's PSoC4HVPA-SPM addresses issues in High Voltage Li Ion Battery Pack Monitoring applications using shunt-based current sensing. This design was implemented using the PSoC platform, which is a combination of 3rd party IPs, providing high degree of flexibility (configurable and programmable). The internal communication protocol IP, iso UART, communicates with other Battery Management IC's in the system, such as Infineon's TLE family of devices. This evolving protocol required a significant number of additional logic gates to resolve issues identified after the initial silicon, and other updates. To handle the logic placement and complex clock tree structures efficiently, our team used Aprisa for P&R. Aprisa offered great controllability for placement and distance verification of the safety critical modules, and an intuitive methodology to handle functional ECOs, with incremental P&R. This resulted in minimal implementation costs and avoided a full flow re-implementation of the design.