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Posts Tagged ‘functional safety’

What ARE the Root Causes of Functional Flaws?

Thursday, November 1st, 2018

Functional flaws in our everyday electronics are annoying. Internet routers can suddenly stop working, or our smart phones can suddenly freeze. For safety-critical systems such as the airplane engine control system, functional flaws can be catastrophic, and can lead to fatalities of all passengers. For both consumer-type and safety-critical systems, ASIC/FPGA teams strive to minimize functional flaws to the best of their abilities using their verification prowess with the help of EDA tools. The more the budget the better the resource they have for minimizing functional flaws.

I just attended the webinar about the results of the Wilson Research Group & Mentor’s 2018 Functional Verification Study, and I can say that I’m not surprised with the results regarding root causes of functional flaws – this is what my team and I come across with frequently when we talk to our prospective customers and verification community.

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Tags: ASIC, DO-254, Embedded, FPGA, functional safety, Functional Verification, hsi, IDesignSpec, Specification, Verification
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DAC 2018 Review with Anupam Bakshi, CEO: Emerging must-have toolset in System Development

Wednesday, July 18th, 2018

This was an intriguing DAC. Hardware-Software Interface (HSI) is increasingly emerging as an area of importance, and because of this Agnisys has begun to emerge as a must-have toolset in the system development toolchain.

It still surprises me that some are just now waking up to this critical area of design. Teams are realizing that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a design is only as robust as the weakest automation script. They are replacing their internal scripts with off-the-shelf professional tools. Agnisys, I’m proud to say, provides just that – professional products to replace register automation scripts.

One thing I did hear many times from attendees is that they are no longer satisfied with just creating register models. They want a test suite that automatically verifies the IP/SoC registers using a variety of techniques including C, UVM, and Formal. We nearly ran out of brochures for ARV-Sim™, ARV-Formal™, and ISequenceSpec™, as these products are intentionally built for exactly that.

Functional Safety driven by the ISO 26262 standard continues to be another hot area. Designers are looking for certified tools that can help them create autonomous vehicles and embedded electronics for automobiles. We shared our solution that fits in the intersection of Functional Safety and Electronic Design.

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Tags: dac, functional safety, hsi, machine learning, SemiEDA
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The Intersection of Functional Safety and Electronic Design – How Safe is Your Ride?

Sunday, May 27th, 2018

The Intersection of Functional Safety and Electronic Design

In an industry that has gone through an incredibly rapid transformation over the past few years alone, auto manufacturers all over the world have had to rethink nearly every aspect of their own processes within the context of the 21st century. Because of this, an almost incredible emphasis has been placed on what concepts like “functional safety” even mean in 2018 (or 2019, or 2020 and beyond). This is especially true as vehicles incorporate more and more electronics with each passing day.

Autonomous vehicles have elevated this concern to the next level because as the level of control that a driver has over their car goes down, the liability of that car’s manufacturer shoots sky high. Many studies have shown that when automated systems are introduced into an industry, there is often a significant increase in the rate of “adverse” events as a result. This is the point that we have currently reached in terms of self-driving cars and functional safety.

In an effort to mitigate this risk as much as possible, functional safety is necessary – but in a way that also addresses the needs of what is already a high-volume, cost-sensitive industry. Luckily, the tools to address this problem sooner rather than later are already here. They just require us to keep a few key things in mind.

Functional Safety in Automotive Electronics: Breaking It Down

One of the most important elements of functional safety as it relates to the embedded systems that are now present in modern day vehicles has to do with fault detection. Simply put, regardless of where a particular fault comes from, the system’s ability to both A) identify it, and B) resolve it in the minimum time span possible is and will always be the goal.

In a lot of ways, this requires functional safety to take a more proactive approach to its own objective than ever before. Especially in an era of self-driving and autonomous vehicles where drivers are relinquishing more control all the time, the system itself must become aware of that fault and, if possible, recover from it, all without either endangering the passengers or requiring any intervention on their behalf, to begin with.