A clear trend in greener technologies is that more and more microcontroller safety features are required in applications such as industrial drives, hybrid electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar inverters. This not only allows for greener applications, but safer applications as well. Safety requirements in applications such as hybrid electric vehicles are obvious in that lives need to be protected in case of a failure. Industrial drives, wind turbine, and solar inverters are not as obvious in terms of needed failure protection. These applications need a certain level of safety as well as high voltages are used to drive these applications and a failure could be catastrophic. TI categorizes the safety features of Concerto™ MCUs in three main groups, error detection and correction, redundancy of functions, and security. When it comes to error detection and correction, special features are necessary to detect and correct a fault. For instance ECC (Error Correction Code) is needed on memory. This allows errors to be detected and then corrected in both Flash and RAM memory. There is also parity which detects errors on special peripherals and registers. CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Checking) is a check sum algorithm run on memory to detect errors. To help with system level detection, comparators have been placed on-chip in order to detect over current or over voltage conditions. Redundancy for functions can add an extra level of detection for critical IP, but the implementation is different for specific customer systems. Redundancy is different from error detection and correction in that the designer must take advantage of redundant features to make the system more robust. For instance, the two cores and two ADCs in Concerto MCUs are available for a customer to use to verify that the application code is running as intended. This could be used in a motor control application where the Cortex-M3 could run a motor calculation while the C28x core can do the same calculation. The result is then checked to see if they come up with the same result. Two ADCs are on the Concerto device so that each core can read the ADC results and check for accuracy in a real-time calculation. There are two clocks so that if one clock has a fault, the secondary clock can serve as a back-up. The security function is available to help customers protect against tampering with their system. Lock protection on GPIO registers allows for the registers not to be overwritten during runtime. Memory protection allows the customer to securely lock their code. Concerto is unique because it provides dual code security lock zones so that both the customer and a third party can lock their code. TI also allows customers to permanently disable the JTAG so that no one can attempt to connect via JTAG and read the internal code. The multiple safety features in Concerto MCUs will help customers protect against faults and failures in a system as well as protect important IP.