Cadence extends verification suite to aid 26262 compliance
An established route to such compliance up to now, Cadence says, has been the Verifault-XL fault engine – but that is a mature product and was designed to work in terms of Verilog gates. Adding fault simulation – fault injection verification management – to the Incisive tool suite gives a 10-fold increase in speed, and the Incisive vManager automatically generates regression profiles and results, that can be directly used in the audit trail.
The offering, Cadence adds, automates three distinct elements of ISO 26262 compliance; traceability, safety verification and tool confidence level.
ISO 26262 compliance is, Cadence points out, required at all levels from system down to IC; and the ability of safety systems to detect faults is the critical measurement for ISO 26262 compliance. The integrated Cadence Incisive functional safety solution reduces the compliance effort by automating the time-intensive manual verification process of fault injection and result analysis for IP, System-on-Chip (SoC) and system designs.
Three separate elements are; establishing quality processes (using known tools to check new software engines); qualtiy measurement, using a stable test environment and varying the parameters of the device under test to check if the system correctly detects errors/unplanned events; and compilation of a safety manual that documents the system’s functional safety.
The solution includes the Incisive Functional Safety Simulator and the Functional Safety Analysis capability in the Incisive vManager solution. The new simulator operates within the Incisive Enterprise Simulator compiled-code engine, providing the reuse of the functional and mixed-signal verification environments to accelerate the time to develop safety verification versus the interpreted Incisive Verifault-XL engine traditionally used in functional safety simulation. “Traditional” (e.g. ‘stuck-at’) faults, single-event-upset, and transient faults, all figure in the strategy.
The The Functional Safety Analysis capability allows the safety engineer to automatically generate a safety verification regression from the fault dictionary created by the simulator and 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. By automating the tracking of these safety metrics, the Incisive functional safety solution automates man-years of effort, and provides the traceable audit trail needed in the systems design chain from semiconductor to OEM suppliers.
The package fits with today’s regression-based testing methodologies, Cadence says, and also meets the test of providing full visibility to the design, basing the fault analysis on the actual, un-abstracted, design.
Cadence; www.cadence.com/news/safety
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