Cadence Introduces Safety Solution for Certification of Automotive, Industrial Designs

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Cadence Design Systems, Inc. has announced the Cadence® Safety Solution, a new offering targeting safety-critical applications and featuring integrated analog and digital safety flows and engines for faster ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 certification. The solution, which includes a new failure modes, effects, and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA) offering called the Cadence Midas™ Safety Platform, allows customers to perform FMEDA-driven analog and digital verification of safety-critical semiconductors for advanced automotive, industrial and aerospace applications.

As state-of-the-art electronics propel the automotive, industrial and aerospace industries into a future of more connectivity and autonomy, the development of safety-compliant semiconductors is critical. Developed to improve automation, confidence and productivity associated with achieving compliance to functional safety standards, such as ISO 26262, the Cadence Safety Solution offers new verification tools, including the Midas Safety Platform, vManager™ Safety Manager and Xcelium™ Safety Simulator. Additionally, the safety solution consists of existing verification, design, analog and digital tools, including the Cadence Jasper™ Functional Safety Verification (FSV) App, Legato™ Reliability Solution, Spectre® Simulation Platform, Genus™ Synthesis Solution, Innovus™ Implementation System, Modus DFT Software Solution and Conformal® Equivalence Checker.

“Semiconductor development for automotive applications presents a host of challenges that the entire supply chain needs to address, including rigorous safety certifications required to achieve compliance with the ISO 26262 standard,” said Paul Cunningham, corporate vice president and general manager of the System & Verification Group at Cadence. “With the new Cadence Safety Solution, customers have access to the Midas Safety Platform, which fully integrates with Cadence design and verification flows, including vManager Safety Manager, Xcelium Safety Simulator, Jasper FSV App, Genus Synthesis Solution, and Spectre Simulation Platform, offering improved productivity and accelerated safety compliance.”

The Cadence Safety Solution includes flows and engines enhanced for advanced safety design and verification. The solution includes: 

FMEDA Management: The new Midas Safety Platform provides early phase exploration of functional safety architectures and leverages native chip design data to perform accurate safety analysis efficiently. The platform is a unified solution available across Cadence products, and with its modular architecture, supports both embedded or standalone usage with the Cadence flow.

Fault Simulation: The new Xcelium Safety Simulator leverages Cadence’s leading native serial and concurrent fault simulation technologies to drive the highest performing safety analysis available. The simulator’s machine learning algorithms, coupled with the formal-based flow, dramatically accelerates the overall verification throughput.

Fault Campaign Management: The new vManager Safety Manager offers functional and safety verification management integrated in one unified system for verification campaign management across all Cadence engines. Customers can experience a 3X turnaround time reduction for safety verification campaigns by leveraging vManager Safety Manager to orchestrate fault coverage across the Jasper FSV App and Xcelium Safety Simulator. Also, the vManager Verification Management platform offers customers connections to enable requirements traceability, while vManager Safety Manager handles safety verification in both analog and digital domains and automates reporting for required safety documentation.

Formal Verification: The Jasper FSV App applies industry-leading formal techniques to fault analysis, reducing a simulation fault list by up to 30%, increasing safety verification performance.

Automated Analog Functional Safety: The Safety Solution integrates the Spectre Simulation Platform and the Legato Reliability Solution to allow automated launching of analog and mixed-signal fault simulations for different failure modes and generation of functional safety diagnostic coverage reports with an annotation back into the Midas Safety Platform, accelerating functional safety closure.

Automated Safety Mechanism Insertion, Optimization and Verification: The Safety Solution integrates the Genus Synthesis Solution, Innovus Implementation System and Conformal Equivalence Checker to guide the insertion of safety mechanisms, such as triple modular redundancy and dual-core lock-step safety islands, in the implementation flow, allowing customers to achieve safety requirements while optimizing for power, performance and area objectives.

"As automation advances in functional safety, the role of standardization from groups like Accellera Systems Initiative and IEEE becomes important," said Alessandra Nardi, senior engineering group director at Cadence. "The Accellera Functional Safety Working Group is defining a standard language to capture and exchange functional safety data that will significantly benefit interoperability and traceability. Cadence is contributing to the Accellera Functional Safety Working Group and supporting the IEEE P2851 efforts to continue the development of these standards."