Micronas’ first ISO 26262 compliant, low-power Hall switch family in SOT23 package very well accepted in the market

In order to fulfil the enhanced functional safety criteria of the automotive industry Micronas has developed the first and currently only available ISO 26262 compliant Hall switch family HAL 15xy for the automotive market.

Freiburg, December 2, 2014 – Micronas (SIX Swiss Exchange: MASN), the most preferred partner for sensing and control, today proudly announces its striking success when it comes to integrate functional safety into a tiny housing.

Regarding its Hall switch portfolio, Micronas is looking back on a long track record. The company produced its first Hall switch back in 1993 and since then has been supplying the automotive market with more than 1.5 billion switches for a very wide variety of applications. The success story now continues with the first ISO 26262 compliant, low-power Hall switch family HAL 15xy in SOT23 JEDEC package. The new switch family is first on the market fulfilling the ever evolving safety criteria in the automotive business with regard to functional and process monitoring.

“ISO 26262 is currently changing the vehicle development in a way, which no-one dared to imagine ten years ago when functional safety was coming more and more to the fore in the automotive industry”, says Dirk Behrens, Vice President Automotive at Micronas. “Our first generation of ASIL-ready Hall switches is one-of-a-kind on the market and meets the trend for enhanced safety requirements and increasing low-power demands. This success is another step towards our vision to become the most preferred partner for sensing and control.”

In case of the HAL 15xy switch family, ISO 26262 compliance means providing the functionality and documentation of an “ASIL ready” classified device. This documentation comprises, amongst others, the failure modes effects and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA), safety guide and fit rates. This information is generated out of the defined development process and is used for the ideal embedding of the sensor into the customers’ system solutions. To enable most efficient failure localization and elimination, the HAL 15xy family provides a single-point fault metric (SPFM) of more than 60% which exceeds even the standard requirements of an ASIL A classification. The sensor monitors for example internal voltage, current and bias levels which derive from the band gap reference and compares them with predefined reference values in order to supervise the operating conditions of the Hall plate and its signal chain. Besides these monitoring functions, which were considered for the SPFM calculation, the HAL 15xy family features an optional and unique power-on self-test allowing the system to test the full signal path inside the sensor before the ordinary operation starts. In contrary to competitive solutions, this special self-test can be enabled without the need for an additional pin within the standard SOT23 3-pin package while the current consumption of only 1.6 mA of the devices is not influenced. To complete the sensors' safety package, the HAL 15xy switches are able to report incorrect operations via an integrated fail safe state directly to the control unit.

Finally, the HAL 15xy is the first ISO 26262 compliant Hall switch sensor family enabling the customer to address ASIL A or even higher classified applications by embedding the sensors’ FMEDA into the customers' diagnostic system.

Start of production is planned for 2015.

Micronas will present its HAL 15xy family from December 11-12 at the Automotive Engineering Exhibition in Nagoya, Japan.