Validation of Functional Safety Module with IEC 61508 Safety Standard

Abstract

In the current generation, humans are using a lot of machines and embedded devices which can cause harm with either physical loss or financial loss. And these machines add luxury to our lifestyle, so it became a crucial part of our life. It’s necessary to make our system hazard-free or at-least to diminish the risks which are introduced due to it. So, a product must be developed considering the risk which is needed to be reduced to its tolerable value. This thesis gives vision to the plan and develops the safety-critical systems which implement the safety functions to decreases the risks caused by different machines and systems. The probability of occurrence or severity of incidents is deteriorated by tracking the system in such a way which keeps the failure in control. The regulation of law and Standard plays a vital role in designing and developing such a system which follows all the requirements starting from initial phase to final product level. In this thesis, Functional safety system is introduced with a design viewpoint for the development of a product which will be used in the industry. A Software-based Lockstep comes in a fault-tolerant system that performs the same set of operations at the same time in a parallel fashion. The comparator logic compares the result on a cycle-by-cycle and if the outcomes are equivalent. On the off chance that there are disparities between the outcomes, this could be a captured without causing failure to the whole system. To increase the correctness of Software-based Lockstep, required set of scenarios are set to validate the feature using multi-threading, Inter-Process Communication and Scheduling processes. Thus, Validation of such timely critical Software-based Lockstep will help to detect the failure in Functional Safety Module of Intel SOC.