To achieve ASIL-D compliance, automotive microcontrollers and SoCs cannot rely on software alone to catch internal semiconductor faults. Modern automotive silicon integrates hardware-level ECC with single-error correction and double-error detection (SECDED), dual-core lockstep with physical delay staggering, and logic/memory Built-In Self-Test (LBIST/MBIST) engines.
If two CPU cores run adjacent to each other on a silicon die and execute the exact same clock edge simultaneously, a single external electromagnetic pulse or voltage spike could induce an identical fault in both cores, causing the hardware comparator to incorrectly report zero discrepancy. In modern ASIL-D silicon, Core B executes the same instruction stream delayed by two clock cycles, and its physical layout is flipped 90 degrees on the die.