Safety verification reduces ISO 26262 compliance preparation by 50%

By automating the time-intensive manual verification process of fault injection and result analysis for IP, SoC and system designs, the solution reduces the compliance effort. Within the Incisive vManager, the solution includes the incisive functional safety simulator and the functional safety analysis capability. Increasing runtime performance up to 10 times, the simulator operates within the incisive enterprise simulator compiled-code engine. Accelerating the time to develop safety verification versus the interpreted incisive Verifault-XL engine traditionally used in functional safety simulation, the engine also provides the seamless reuse of the functional and mixed-signal verification environments.

The critical measurement for ISO 26262 compliance is the ability of safety systems to detect faults. The safety engineer can automatically generate a safety verification regression from the fault dictionary created by the simulator using the functional safety analysis capability. This enables the incisive vManager solution to track millions of detected, partially detected and undetected faults introduced into simulation to verify the safety systems in a design. This tracking automates man-years of effort and provides the traceable audit trail needed in the systems design chain from semiconductor to OEM suppliers.

"At Melexis, we pride ourselves on achieving the highest standards for the safest, most innovative and technically-advanced automotive sensors and semiconductor systems,” said Philippe Laugier, Digital Competence Center Manager, Melexis. “While ensuring safety is a time consuming and costly process, it is paramount in the automotive market and ISO 26262 compliance is required to ensure it. By automating functional safety verification, Cadence provides a solution that significantly reduces the effort compared to existing approaches.”

“Addressing functional safety challenges, particularly in automotive electronics, is critical for the success of system and semiconductor companies,” said Charlie Huang, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations and System & Verification Group, Cadence. “By partnering with companies like Melexis who embrace functional safety today, Cadence is delivering a solution that enables engineers to more efficiently address one of the key requirements to proliferate fault-tolerant electronics in the automotive industry where the safety of consumers is paramount.”

The incisive functional safety solution will be widely available in the first half of 2015.