Renesas tool eases compliance for safety-critical automotive systems

The failure mode effects and diagnostics analysis (FMEDA) software is optimized for ISO 26262, which addresses safety of electrical and electronic systems within road vehicles. It, said Renesas, addresses the adaptation of general ‘safety element out of context’ (SEooC) analysis reports to align with the final application-specific use cases and the need to support several safety goals for one item.

“This is a tool developed by safety engineers, involved with the creation of the ISO26262 standard, for safety engineers,” said Renesas director of functional safety compliance Riccardo Vincelli. “It is the result of intensive internal activity to find solutions for daily challenges associated with safety analysis, effective exchange of results with stakeholders, and customisation based on different use cases.”

Branded ‘CAR’, it offers a multi-layered view of the safety-related component, complete with customisable analysis parameters and all of the results required by ISO 26262, such as ‘single point fault metric’ (SPFM) and ‘latent fault metric’ (LFM). Estimations are provided for both ‘probabilistic metric for random hardware failures’ (PMHF) and its evaluation of each cause of safety goal violation. These results can be displayed from the entire component down to each single element via different hierarchical levels, splitting its FIT in the appropriate fault class – for example, single-point, residual or latent, said the firm, adding: “This also makes it easy and effective to browse complex system-on-chip or microcontroller safety analyses.”

For a given product, the provided library can be customised to different applications to match the usage of the component in the target system. FIT characteristics, fault characterisation, failure modes, fault impact, and fault coverage are some of the parameters under user control.