Accellera Issues Standardization Initiative to Address Design Automation and Tool Interoperability for Functional Safety

Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), an electronics industry organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced the formation of a Proposed Working Group (PWG) to focus on a standard to enable tool interoperability between Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) for functional safety and the design and verification flow of electronic circuits and systems.

“Functional safety is a requirement for safety-critical applications,” says Lu Dai, chair of Accellera. “The purpose of the PWG is to explore industry interest and to determine the level of commitment in moving forward with standardization efforts. Our standardization initiatives are user-driven, and we look forward to feedback from the community in the coming months to help us determine our efforts in this area.”

“The EDA industry is already developing tools to perform functional safety analysis and this initiative aims at improving interoperability to capture, propagate, and trace the safety intent and optimizations through an EDA solution and across FMEDA tools,” says Martin Barnasconi, Accellera Technical Committee chair. “We invite companies active in this domain to share their best practices, requirements, and expectations on what a functional safety standard should encompass.”

The first Functional Safety Proposed Working Group meeting will be held Friday, December 6, at NXP Semiconductors, Schatzbogen 7, 81829 Munich, Germany. The meeting is planned from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. CEST and will include presentations on industry best practices and requirements, and will explore directions for standardization. Attendance is open to everyone, but registration is required. 

Participants in the PWG do not need to be from Accellera member companies.

The objective of the PWG is to explore the need for a unified approach to enable a functional safety solution.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.