Achieving Functional Safety Standards with Agnisys Products Suite
Agnisys is an Electronics Design Automation (EDA) company offering tools to automate specification to IP and SoC design and development, reducing cycle time by as much as 30%. Agnisys tools also help users achieve all this automation along with functional safety.
Functional Safety in Brief
The portion of a system’s overall safety that depends on automatic protection responding appropriately to its inputs or failing predictably is known as functional safety (fail-safe). The automatic protection system must be built to withstand hardware malfunctions and likely systematic faults.
Based on IEC 61508, the automobile industry created the ISO 26262 Road Vehicles Functional Safety Standard. The public is protected and adherence to relevant laws is ensured by the certification of those systems.
Ways of Achieving Functional Safety (FS) with Agnisys
1. FS-certified Agnisys products
- How Agnisys Tools Achieve Functional Safety Standards
2. FS features built into the Agnisys IDesignSpec™ Suite
1. FS Certified Agnisys Products
A functional safety solution for IC design provides benefits for semiconductor designers. The certification process of any product is extensive, so using our certified design and verification tools provides three major benefits:
- It reduces the time for your product certification
- It supports high-reliability design automation from a design specification
- It shortens the time for verification of the functional safety elements in the design
IDesignSpec suite of products that includes the following tools and flavors with the respective versions:
| Tools | Tool flavors | Abbreviation | Functionally Safe Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| IDS-GDI™ | |||
| IDSWord™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| IDSExcel™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| IDSCalc™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| IDS NextGen™ | IDS-NG™ | Version 8 FS | |
| IDSBatch CLI™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| IDS-Validate | ISequenceSpec | ISS™ | Version 8 FS |
| IDS-Integrate | Version 8 FS | ||
| IDS-Verify | |||
| ARV-Sim™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| ARV-Formal™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| ARV-C™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| Specta-AV™ | Version 8 FS | ||
| IDS-Validate | ASVV | Version 8 FS |
How Agnisys Tools Achieve Functional Safety Standards
★ ISO 26262 Lifecycle
IDesignSpec has been created by a team of qualified, experienced, and dedicated professionals. The development team follows extensive and strict quality control procedures to ensure a high-quality product that can be trusted.
An agile approach is used for development with one or two sprints in a month. At the end of each sprint, a release is made available on the Agnisys customer portal.
Safety is interwoven right from the start of the specification stage and continues through the development process. A dedicated Functional Safety team ensures that safety is taken seriously and the process related to safety is followed.
IDesignSpec has been carefully crafted over several years with feedback from countless users. We expect that all customers will continue to provide us with feedback to improve the tool suite.
★ Use Cases for the Agnisys Product Suite:
- Register data to verification and firmware outputs
- Sequence and register data to various outputs
- Sequence, checkers, and register data to various outputs
- Register spec, sequence spec to system level outputs
- Connectivity spec to outputs
Based on ISO26262 if the Tool Impact Level is TI1 and the Tool Detection Level is TD1 or TD3, the Tool Confidence Level is TCL1. Also, if the Tool Impact Level is TI2 and the Tool Detection level is TD1, then the Tool Confidence Level is TCL1.
For all use cases, the TOOL CONFIDENCE LEVEL is TCL1.
★ ISO 26262 compliance
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Possible Malfunctions/Erroneous Outputs:
There are two possible types of malfunctions that can occur
1. Those that can be detected by the tool and no output is generated
2. Those that cannot be detected by the tool, and,
a. an illegal output is generated, or,
b. a legal output is generated but is functionally incorrect.
This type of classification of malfunctions applies to design outputs, verification outputs, firmware outputs, and API/standards. These types of outputs go through a compiler where the syntax and semantic checks are done.
- Detailed Measures to Detect/Prevent Errors:
The generated code does not directly go to the output, it is typically passed through linting, simulation, and synthesis before becoming part of the end product.
- Diagnostic Measures
For the customer, IDesignSpec is simple to use. The customer creates a specification and expects 100% correct output in every case, and rightly so. However, behind the simplicity is the very complex nature of the development and verification. This complexity arises from the fact that the user can input any specification and any set of properties in any combination.
- Tool Detection Level
There is a high degree of confidence that a malfunction in the tool and its corresponding generated code will be detected or prevented from going to the customer product. Hence the Tool Detection level is TD1 for design outputs, verification outputs, and firmware.
★ Tool Class Based on IEC 61508
The tool-generated outputs cover design, verification, and firmware as well as other non-executable outputs such as documentation, standards, etc. So the tool class can be either T1, T2, or T3 based on the specific outputs that may or may not contribute to the executable code, and they can be applied in the safety development by using measures.
2. FS Features in IDesignSpec
IDesignSpec has some built-in features that users can use to achieve functional safety. They are:
- Sniffing Engine
- SECDED
- Parity
- CRC
Conclusion
The Agnisys team has worked hard to get the ISO26262/IEC61508 certification. Now that the products are certified, any customer who needs to create a functionally safe system and get their certification can rely on our products.
To get more information about how we can help you create a functionally safe system, reach out to us here.
