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Functional safety for Silicon IP used to
be a niche activity, limited to an elite
circle of chip and system developers in
automotive, industrial, aerospace and
similar markets. However over the last
few years that’s changed significantly.
There’s now a more tangible vision
towards self-driving cars with
increasingly adventurous Advanced
Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to
capture people’s interest along with
media-rich in-vehicle infotainment.
Moreover the emergence of drones in
all shapes and sizes and the growing
ubiquity of industrial Internet of Things
are also proliferating the requirement
for functional safety, all of which are
relevant to ARM
®
.
Much like any technology market
surrounded in ‘buzz’ these burgeoning
applications require semiconductors to
make them happen and the fast-pace
of product innovation has attracted
huge interest from ARM’s partners. In
the IP community ARM leads the way
with a broad portfolio of IP from ARM
Cortex
®
-M0+ to the mighty Cortex-A72
and beyond. With a heritage in secure
compute platforms and functional
safety ARM is well placed to enable
the success of its silicon partners.
What’s functional safety
all about?
In a nut-shell, functional safety
is what the name says, it’s about
ensuring that products operate safely
and continue to do so even when they
go wrong. ISO 26262 the standard
for automotive electronics defines
functional safety as:
ISO 26262 “the absence of
unreasonable risk due to hazards
caused by malfunctioning behaviour
of electrical / electronics systems”.
Standards for other markets such as
IEC 61508 for electrical and electronic
systems and DO-254 for airborne
electronic hardware have their own
definitions, although more importantly
they also set their own expectations
for engineering developments. Hence
it’s important to identify the target
markets before starting development
and ensure suitable processes are
followed – attempts to ‘retrofit’
development processes can be costly
and ineffective so best avoided. Figure
1 illustrates a variety of standards
applicable to Silicon IP.
In practice, functionally safe means a
system that is demonstrably safe to a
skilled third-party assessor, behaving
predictably in the event of a fault.
It must fail safe which could be with full
functionality or graceful degradation
such as reduced functionality or a
clean shutdown followed by a reset
and restart. It's important to realize
Functional Safety and what it means
for System IP
hopkins, ARM Processors
52 l New-Tech Magazine Europe