Unlock ISO 26262 Certification Success with Agnisys for ASICs

Within the automotive sector, the safety of electrical and electronic systems (E/E) is mission-critical. As many of you likely already know, ISO 26262 is the international standard for functional safety. For customers designing ASICs in the automotive industry, ISO 26262 serves as a guarantee. It ensures that adequate safety is achieved and preserved throughout the vehicle’s lifecycle. You’ve likely encountered much discussion about this standard due to the rise of self-driving cars. As expected, these autonomous vehicles have brought a substantial spotlight onto safety considerations. ISO 26262 is the primary industry prescription for developing functionally safe automobiles. This standard covers not just cars, but also trucks, buses, and other types of road vehicles.

ISO 26262 pre-dates autonomous vehicles by years, addressing all aspects of E/E systems in road vehicles. When the vehicle itself is doing the driving, safety is paramount. However, even when a human is at the wheel, safety can be compromised by various types of E/E failures. If you’re designing ICs for any part of any electronic subsystem in road vehicles, ISO 26262 is vitally important.

Safety considerations extend to diverse applications, from medical devices to IoT. Failures could lead to severe outcomes in areas like weapons, nuclear plants, and home security systems. The electronics industry has responded with comprehensive standards, addressing industrial, railway, avionics, military, machinery, nuclear, and medical applications. These standards aim to ensure safety across a wide spectrum of critical areas, emphasizing the industry’s commitment to preventing potential harm and protecting lives.

Consequently, several designers working on ICs for these applications have already thought seriously about functional safety. The basic idea common to all the safety standards is taking appropriate action in response to a fault in the system to prevent a catastrophic failure. That means you must design your chips to detect faults and either correct them or bring the vehicle to a safe condition.

Road travel is a notoriously difficult environment for electronic systems. You have extremes in temperature and humidity, noise and vibration, alpha particles that can flip memory bits, chip aging effects, and more. You must handle these properly with safety mechanisms that detect or correct faults due to these challenging conditions. This is an area where you can benefit from the years of experience gleaned in safety-critical design for all the applications listed above.

Agnisys makes it easy for you to meet the requirements of ISO 26262 and other safety standards. Our IDesignSpec Suite automatically inserts the safety mechanisms you request into its generated register-transfer-level (RTL) designs. These mechanisms are all well-proven by decades of use in a wide range of electronic systems. Agnisys supports the following options:

• Adding and checking a parity bit to detect a changed value
• Calculating and checking a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) to detect a changed value
• Calculating and checking Single Error Correction Double Error Detection (SECDED) to both detect and correct an incorrect value
• Adding Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) so that two correct values will “outvote” an incorrect value

All this support for safety-critical design takes no effort on your part. You simply tell us which safety mechanisms you want in which parts of your chip, and our solution generates them automatically. The safety assessment methods specified in ISO 26262 enable you to gain a quantitative reading on how well your design is protected against faults of all kinds. Your automotive sector customers are certain to be heavily concerned with ISO 26262 and will ask you to show how your chip meets its requirements, and whether your design process is compliant with the standard.

Safety standards have a ripple effect: end manufacturers demand compliance from their subsystem developers, who in turn demand it from their chip suppliers, who in turn demand it from their electronic design automation (EDA) vendors. As a designer of vehicular electronics systems, you must show that the EDA tools you use in your development flow meet the requirements of ISO 26262.

Ensuring your EDA tools qualify for developing functionally safe chips demands significant effort, consumes resources, adds costs, and causes delays.  Agnisys eliminates all that worry because we qualify our tools as suitable for ISO 26262 design. Our entire IDesignSpec Suite and development flow is certified by the internationally known testing and inspection organization TÜV SÜD as having achieved the stringent tool qualification criteria defined by ISO 26262 as well as the related underlying standard IEC 61508.

You can have high confidence in this certification, the result of a long and arduous process.

TÜV SÜD conducted a detailed investigation of Agnisys tools, team, and development processes. They evaluated our tools and audited our product verification and validation flow, quality assurance (QA) procedures, configuration and release management, and user support procedures. Their endorsement means that you don’t have to worry about ISO 26262 tool compliance.