IEC61508 certified software reduces risk for designers

26th August 2014

Renesas

Staff Reporter

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The IEC61508 (Functional Safety) certification has been obtained by Renesas Electronic's RX631, RX63N Safety Package. The package features a self-diagnostic software and safety manual for MCUs necessary to implement functional safety in industrial equipment. An evaluation kit will be available in September 2014, providing a hardware evaluation board with the RX63N MCU, the evaluation version of the self-diagnostic software library, and a Users Guide.

The IEC 61508 functional safety standard not only requires system designers to perform tasks referred to as safety analysis, but also requires the meeting of defined regulations aimed at reducing specification and design errors in the development process of safety-related systems that can result in malfunctions. Renesas successfully carried out tasks obtaining to the safety analysis and study of failure diagnostic methods and diagnostic yields related to the MCU. For the testing process, Renesas leveraged the IAR Embedded Workbench for RX certified for Functional Safety, which fulfilled the requirement for proof of tools safety certification.

Key features of the RX631, RX63N Functional Safety Package Solution:

1) Self-diagnostic software library and safety manual for RX631 and RX63N 32-bit MCUs
The safety manual contains the results of safety analysis performed on each internal functional block of the MCU, and the self-diagnostic software library covers the CPU, RAM, and flash ROM. The self-diagnostic software uses fault simulation (Note 2) to obtain the diagnostic yields of CPU-related diagnostics. This provides a clear basis for diagnostic yields and contributes to more efficient development.

2) IEC 61508–certified self-diagnostic software library for a simplified software development process
The self-diagnostic software library for the RX631 and RX63N MCUs has been certified as compliant with IEC 61508 SIL3 by the international certification authority TÜV Rheinland of Germany. When installing this software, the customer can omit the usual verification of conformance of the software development process required by the IEC 61508 standard.

3) RX631, RX63N Safety Solution Evaluation Kit
The RX631, RX63N Safety Solution Evaluation Kit includes an MCU self-diagnostic software library, an evaluation board with the RX63N MCU installed on it, as well as the TÜV-certified IAR Workbench and compiler from IAR Systems. This will enable system designers to get started immediately with diagnostic software performance evaluation and initial system consideration.

Renesas Electronics has also achieved UL 60730-1 compliance certification for hardware safety features on the RL78 MCU family.