Every week I read headlines about the progress of autonomous vehicles, and the inevitable questions began to arise, like, “Just how safe is this AV?”, or “Is this new ADAS feature trustworthy?” The automotive industry has already setup the ISO 26262 functional safety standard, and we’ve blogged about that topic quite a bit on SemiWiki. EDA vendors have begun to receive third party ISO 26262 qualification of their point tools, so that’s a reassuring step.
Our EDA industry has delivered RTL language standards over the years and Accellera is always at the center of these efforts, so the good news is that a standardization initiative was just announced for a Proposed Working Group (PWG) that addresses functional safety for EDA and IP. They will be looking at how Failure Modes, Effect and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) is applied to functional safety using EDA tool and semiconductor IP blocks.
Accellera issued a press release recently with quotes from Lu Dai the Chair of Accellera, and Martin Barnasconi the Technical Committee Chair. Any EDA or IP provider that is offering tools, IP and services to functional safety markets like automotive should consider attending the first meeting of this PWG, scheduled for December 6th in Germany at the NXP Semiconductor office, Schatzbogen 7, 81829 Munich.
You’ll need to first register for this event online here. To learn more about what this Functional Safety PWG is all about, read this. There are some 14 active working groups with members representing many leading companies, like: NXP, Intel, AMD, Mentor, Synopsys, Bosch-Sensortec, Maxim, NVIDIA and Xilinx.
If your expertise includes functional safety but your company isn’t part of Accellera, you can still participate in this new PWG, so why not be part of something that contributes to standardization. Instead of multiple EDA and IP vendors trying to forge independent routes to functional safety, it kind of makes sense to share best practices and even move towards interoperability.
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Background on Functional Safety Proposed Working Group
There is significant activity ongoing in the EDA community to enable functional safety as a part of the design and verification flow. There have been various discussions on the need for a standardized language or format to specify functional safety information and enable tool interoperability. The objective of the PWG is to explore the need for a unified approach to enable a functional safety solution.
About Accellera Systems Initiative
Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. Find out more about membership. Follow @accellera on Twitter or to comment, please use #accellera. Accellera Global Sponsors are: Cadence; Mentor, A Siemens Business; and Synopsys.
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