An expansion to the Cadence Incisive functional verification platform, the new fault injection and safety verification technologies help automotive engineers automate ISO 26262 compliance for traceability, safety verification and tool confidence level (TCL).

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.

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, boosting runtime performance up to 10x and providing the seamless 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.

The ability of safety systems to detect faults is the critical measurement for ISO 26262 compliance. 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.

"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 at 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 at 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 Simulator and Functional Safety Analysis technologies are part of the Cadence System Development Suite (SDS), addressing the largest and most complex verification and hardware-software co-development challenges faced by semiconductor and system companies.