Under industrial safety mandates, industrial equipment must be certified to ensure electrical, electronic or programmable electronic systems that carry out safety functions meet industry-standard safety guidelines. Generally, such products must fulfill requirements of the IEC 61508 standard to safety integrity level 3 (SIL 3), and meet the ISO 13849 standard to performance level category 4 (PL e Cat 4.)

In addition, as the complexity of safety designs increases, the need to provide advanced safety functions and to integrate safety functionality with the application, has led to the need for advanced certified toolflows, such as Altera Safety Design Partitioning toolflow, offered in this latest version of the Functional Safety Data Package. This partitioning toolflow gives designers the ability to separate the safe and non-safe portions of the design, allowing user updates of the non-safe portion with minimal safety re-certification effort.

“Without certified toolflows such as those Altera’s safety package provides, customers are left with the challenge of certifying the tools and devices themselves, which require they use older versions of the tools and subsequently, older less-capable technology,” said Roger May, system architect and Functional Safety lead in the Altera Industrial Business Unit, “With the release of our third generation of our Functional Safety Data Package, customers can continue to confidently use Altera’s latest devices and toolflows to address the challenges they are seeing today in designing safety systems.”

Altera today, also announced the availability the Cyclone V-based SafeFlex Functional Safety board from partner NewTec GmbH, which was demonstrated at the SPS IC Drives event in Nuremberg, in November, 2014 and satisfies the requirement for IEC 61508 to SIL 3in addition to ISO 13849 to PL e Cat 4. The board and associated documentation and reference design will allow systems designers who are new to safety to understand best industry practices when implementing safety systems up to SIL3 & PL e Cat 4 on Altera FPGA’s,. allowing Altera customers to accelerate their designs.