: This article presents a comprehensive, publication-ready treatment of fault-tolerant zonal controller architectures for modern automotive electrical/electronic (E/E) systems, synthesizing cross-layer reliability concepts, hardware lockstep techniques, time-sensitive scheduling, and zonal Ethernet/CAN-FD topologies into a unified design and evaluation framework. The work situates the zonal controller as a critical node in the transition to domain-zonal distributed architectures, and proposes a dual-core lockstep design, inspired by industry practice and radiation-tolerant research, augmented with software and runtime mitigations to achieve high dependability under transient faults, soft errors, and interference. The methodology integrates design-time redundancy, runtime adaptation of time-triggered schedules, and low-cost recovery mechanisms to balance safety, cost, and performance. Results are described in qualitative and descriptive quantitative terms that connect architectural choices to observed and expected reliability outcomes, drawing on empirical findings in radiation stress testing, lockstep implementations, and fault injection studies. The discussion elaborates theoretical implications, tradeoffs among redundancy, cost, and latency, and the interplay between zonal topology, over-the-air update security, and synchronization constraints. Limitations and directions for future work—covering mixed-criticality scaling, formal verification of schedule adaptation, and co-design with emerging RISC-V and heterogeneous compute fabrics—are presented. This synthesis offers practitioners and researchers a detailed blueprint and critical analysis for designing resilient zonal controllers suitable for present-generation automotive platforms

zonal controller, fault tolerance, dual-core lockstep, time-triggered scheduling

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