Industrial Functional Safety Standard-based Software Validation

Abstract

We are belonging from the era where we are connected with machines or electronic devices in one or another way. These machines are used for giving us the extravagance life meaning we are using some of them in daily routine as a part of our lives. It is necessary to make these machines or devices hazard-free or else to curtail the risks caused by them. These products must be developed having tolerable risks that can be reduced. This thesis gives an idea to the plan and progresses the safety-critical systems which implement the safety functions to reduce the dangers. The probability of occurrence or severity of events is declined by tracking the system in such a way which keeps the failure in control. Some standards and some regulatory laws play a vital role in having requirements from the initial phase to the final product level in such kind of development cycle. From a design point of view, the Functional safety system is introduced in this report that is used for the development of the product. Functional Safety (FuSa) is becoming a critical issue for Industrial & Automotive chips. IEC61508 & ISO 26262 are industry standards for Functional Safety in Industrial & Automotive domains respectively. These standards address possible hazards caused by malfunctioning behaviour of electrical or electronic devices due to random HW failures and systematic failures. They provide a framework to enable safety management, by determining safety integrity levels (SIL) and Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL). The fault-tolerant system performs the same actions at an identical period in a parallel manner to check out the unwanted failure. A software-based Lockstep system is the unsurpassed examples of this kind of system. A system is taken for testing with a safety monitor as an internal intellectual property (IP), which will monitor all the safety critical components of the system and test them periodically for any error/failure. The aim is to detect and handle any failure as soon as possible, reducing the risk factor to an ignorable point. To further increase the coverage of safety monitor, a host SW stack is used that runs on the Real-Time Operating System. This host SW stack will also run some periodic checks on a different set of safety critical components of the system and report it to our safety monitor. This whole validation will be aimed at meeting the compliance with IEC 61508 norms.