With the demand to improve safety in the workplace and reduce operating costs, the industry has initiated the need to implement functional safety standards according to IEC61508 to design inherent safety for control systems and equipment.

"Compliance with safety directives such as IEC61508 is a necessary yet complex process for developers designing industrial or safety systems," said Ritesh Tyagi, Senior Director, Marketing, Renesas Electronics America, Inc.

"Renesas' new RX Functional Safety solution simplifies this process by providing pre-certified diagnostic software and a comprehensive Safety Manual that reduces design risk and development time, allowing engineers to focus on their core competence."

To conform to functional safety, system manufacturers need to perform safety analysis not just at the system level, but also down to the device level. Safety analysis includes failure mode analysis, consideration of diagnostic methods, and assessment of its diagnostic coverage. Doing these tests and trying to get detailed test analysis from the device manufacturer is a significant burden.

Renesas' safety solution for the RX631 and RX63N Group of MCUs has removed this burden by providing a self-test diagnostic software library and a complete safety manual.

Key features of the new functional safety solution:

(1) Safety manual

For the functional safety qualification, a comprehensive analysis targeting the IEC61508 functional safety standard is performed and the result is published in the safety manual. The safety manual includes the RX MCU's hardware safety mechanism, the diagnostic methods of software with its diagnostic coverage, and the safety parameter based on safety analysis for each function part of the MCU.

(2) Self-test diagnostic software library

A diagnostic software library for the CPU core, RAM and flash ROM. Since the diagnostic coverage of the CPU core has undergone comprehensive fault simulation tests (Note 1), the design solution makes it easy to show the basis of the coverage estimation and enables effective system integration.

(3) Compliant with the RX631/63N Group of MCUs

The new functional safety solution is compliant with Renesas' RX631 and RX63N MCUs. The RX631 and RX63N MCUs are high-performance, 32-bit MCUs that operate at 1.65 DMIPS/MHz, and include a floating point unit (FPU), hardware multipliers & MAC, flash operation without wait states, memory sizes up to 2MB of on-chip flash, and a rich set of peripherals such as multiple timers, high speed analog, Ethernet connectivity, and built-in safety-related functions. By using the new functional safety solution, system manufacturers can easily apply functional safety to their systems using the RX631 and RX63N MCUs. Renesas is also planning to expand this safety solution to the company's other RX family MCUs.