ISO 26262

What Is the ISO 26262 Functional Safety Standard?

Automotive Standard ISO 26262, "Road Vehicles – Functional Safety," is a standard for functional safety for electronic, electrical, embedded, and software components in production road vehicles. This standard provides guidelines for the automotive safety lifecycle and for tailoring activities from development to decommissioning. The latest revision of this standard was released in 2018.

ISO 26262 ensures that automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers develop products that minimize the hazards caused by malfunctions. OEMs and suppliers must document and qualify their devices to work inside passenger vehicles. Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) ratings are various risk levels ranging from A to D, with A being the lowest standard and D the highest.

Product Development at the Hardware Level (Part 5)

Product development at the hardware level includes the framework for functional safety when developing hardware components. For example, it deals with hardware design, hardware safety requirements in the design phase, and safety evaluation. It ensures that hardware components are architecturally sound and are rigorously tested for compliance before they make it to production.

Product Development at the Software Level (Part 6)

Product development in the software development lifecycle focuses on software architecture, testing, safety requirements, and product development on the software level. The end goal is that the embedded software running on electronic hardware meets strict safety and failure mitigation requirements. ISO 26262 demands that software components assist safety and other mitigation measures in every way possible.

ISO 26262: 2018 addresses the requirements considering increased ride shares and ADAS manufacturing, resulting in significant deployment issues and an increase in self-driving cars. It also covers standards on vehicle weight, gathering semiconductor manufacturing requirements and software qualification requirements with TCL levels 1, 2, and 3.

 

What Are the Benefits of ISO 26262?

The Automotive Standard ISO 26262 benefits the industry by maintaining high standards for safety. The standard has a holistic approach to functional safety. It forms the framework to ensure the functional safety of products across the lifecycle and processes driven by a risk-based approach. It ensures safety from the earliest concept to the decommissioning of the vehicle.

ISO 26262 emphasizes the traceability and tracking of requirements in electrical, electronic, and semiconductor chips from needs to testing, leaving no room for new versions to break existing systems. It also allows manufacturers to differentiate themselves through their safety ratings. Additionally, it focuses on internationally recognized standards, which means a designer can rest easy interacting with vehicle systems globally.

Cadence Supports ISO 26262

Although ISO 26262 is aimed mainly at describing various aspects of functional safety requirements, mechanisms to ensure, and methodologies to analyze automotive functional safety, functional safety is also essential for other safety-critical electronic systems in aerospace, medical, and industrial automation.

Cadence supports Automotive Standard ISO 26262. By integrating this functionality into the core of its hardware development tools, it is now possible to design your hardware components to comply with these safety standards and other criteria.

The Cadence Genus and Innovus toolset-based “safety-aware digital design flow” has functional safety features on a safety-critical design, designed with GF 22FDX based on the Automotive Grade 1 (AG-1) nine-track standard-cell library.

Cadence Tensilica ConnX B10 and ConnX B20 DSPs are the industry’s first DSPs optimized for automotive radar, lidar, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) to achieve ASIL B random fault and ASIL D systemic fault-compliant certification. The ASIL certification of the ISO 26262:2018 functional safety standard is essential for developing automotive systems-on-chip (SoCs) in autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications. Tensilica ConnX DSPs support Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, enabling SoC design excellence.

Cadence provides safety architecture for automotive in close collaboration with customers and provides a technical safety concept in all phases, including preparation, architecture development, design, and for follow-on projects. Cadence’s simulation and formal verification offerings assist in verifying the safety implementation during the design phase. These tools help fix defects uncovered with fault injection runs before freezing the design. The Cadence automotive safety solution consists of the Midas Safety Platform closely integrated with Cadence IC design flows, covering both analog and digital verification planning, analysis, and tracking. The Cadence Verisium Manager App and Legato Reliability Solution manage and run the fault campaigns, including fault classification and control of all verification engines. The Midas platform allows customers to perform Failure Mode Effect and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA)-driven analog and digital verification of safety-critical semiconductors for advanced automotive, industrial, and aerospace applications.

Cadence minimizes the probability of needing a redesign because your component was not compliant. Cadence tools are crucial for designers in the automotive sector who want to separate themselves from the competition from a safety perspective. Cadence works with its customers in semiconductor technology and EDA to deliver safe electronics without compromising low power and cost. Learn more and get started today.