Speed the development of IEC 61508-compliant designs

Under industrial safety mandates, industrial equipment must be certified to ensure electrical, electronic or programmable electronic systems that carry out safety functions meet industry-standard safety guidelines. Generally, such products must fulfill requirements of the IEC 61508 standard to SIL 3, and meet the ISO 13849 standard to performance level category 4.

In addition, as the complexity of safety designs increases, the need to provide advanced safety functions and to integrate safety functionality with the application has led to the need for advanced certified toolflows. The Altera Safety Design Partitioning toolflow, offered in this latest version of the Functional Safety Data package, is such a toolflow. This partitioning toolflow provides designers with the ability to separate the safe and non-safe portions of the design, allowing user updates of the non-safe portion with minimal safety re-certification effort.

“Without certified toolflows such as those that Altera’s safety package provides, customers are left with the challenge of certifying the tools and devices themselves, which requires that they use older versions of the tools and subsequently, older less-capable technology,” said Roger May, System Architect and Functional Safety lead, Industrial Business Unit, Altera. “With the release of our 3rd gen Functional Safety Data package, customers can continue to confidently use Altera’s latest devices and toolflows to address the challenges they are seeing today in designing safety systems.”

Altera have also announced the availability the Cyclone V-based SafeFlex Functional Safety board from partner NewTec, which satisfies the requirement for IEC 61508 to SIL 3 in addition to ISO 13849 to PL e Cat 4. The board, the associated documentation and the reference design will allow systems designers who are new to safety to understand best industry practices when implementing safety systems up to SIL3 and PL e Cat 4 on Altera FPGAs.