How To Build Functional Safety Into Your Design From The Start


The focus on functional safety IP is rapidly growing and we’re seeing this growth not just in automotive but in many other markets including, avionics, medical, industrial and railways, where systems need to efficiently identify and mitigate the occurrences of faults, and where more confidence is required with respect to the design practises employed for the development of IP. Currently, m... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Synopsys uncorked ASIL B, C, and D ready versions of its DesignWare EV6x Embedded Vision Processors for automotive SoCs. An included Safety Enhancement Package provides hardware safety features, safety monitors, and lockstep capabilities for safety-critical designs. The processors integrate scalar, vector DSP, and CNN processing units for automotive systems that require deep lea... » read more

Designing Hardware For Security


By Ed Sperling and Kevin Fogarty Cyber criminals are beginning to target weaknesses in hardware to take control of devices, rather than using the hardware as a stepping stone to access to the software. This shift underscores a significant increase in the sophistication of the attackers, as evidenced by the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown by Google Project Zero in 2017 (made public in Ja... » read more

Making Sense Of Safety Standards


If you’re involved in the design or verification of safety-critical electronics, you’ve probably heard about some of the standards that apply to such development projects. If not, then you’re probably puzzled when you read about TÜV SÜD certifying that an EDA tool satisfies functional safety standards ISO 26262 (TCL3/ASIL D), IEC 61508 (T2/SIL 3) and EN 50128 (T2/SIL 3). The industry ha... » read more

Functional Safety For FPGA-Based Hardware Designs


Advances in design and manufacturing technology allow increased factory automation, where tasks are automatically performed by sophisticated equipment such as industrial robots. Manufacturing processes require fail-safe mechanisms to prevent human injury or costly downtime. With increasing sophistication and automation of the manufacturing processes, there is increasing need for error detection... » read more

IP Risk Sharing


For most people within the semiconductor industry, managing risk involves making the right product decisions that will enable a company to be profitable, and ensuring the product is successfully produced within the necessary time window. In contrast, for products within high-risk areas such as medical and mil/aero, design often proceeds at a slower pace, using proven technologies and adopting l... » read more

New Approaches For Reliability


The definition of reliability hasn’t budged since the invention of the IC, but how to achieve it is starting to change. In safety-critical systems, as well as in markets such as aerospace, demands for reliability are so rigorous that they often require redundant circuitry—and for good reason. A PanAmSat malfunction in 1998 caused by tin whisker growth wiped out pagers for 45 million use... » read more

Newer posts →