Planning a Long Drive this Summer? A Look Behind the Safety of Your Car’s Electronics

We know you are particular about your road safety while driving your automobile. And, of course, you should be!

But for the car makers and us, the functional safety of the chips in your automobile is a top priority. Why?

Functional safety activities start at the beginning of a product's development cycle. It's like raising a kid—you must start teaching them good habits when they're young, so they don't grow up as a safety hazard.

Confused? Don't know about functional safety? Let's start with what functional safety is.

Functional safety means detecting potential dangerous conditions and activating protection mechanisms to prevent hazardous events or providing mitigation to reduce the consequences of the hazardous events. And this applies well to the automobile, too!

According to the ISO 26262 international standard, functional safety means the absence of unreasonable risk to individuals caused by potential malfunctions in electrical/electronic systems.

ISO 26262 "Road Vehicles– Functional Safety"is an international standard for the functional safety of electrical and/or electronic systems for automobiles defined by the International Organization Standardization (ISO). The FMEDA (Failure Mode Effect and Diagnostic Analysis) is one of the safety analyses proposed by ISO 26262.

We need a way to ensure that safety analysis tools are integrated with IC design tools or flows.

Cadence has introduced the Midas Safety Platform, which seamlessly integrates with all Cadence IC design flows to enable an FMEDA-driven design, analysis, verification, and implementation of analog/mixed-signal and digital semiconductors and IP. The integrated framework provides a workflow that guides the safety engineer through all the key steps, from FMEDA creation, safety analysis, safety verification, and safety-aware implementation.

So now you know what the Midas Safety Solution is. But how does it work?

Functional safety analysis includes an architectural and detailed FMEDA setup. You must also define parts, subparts, technology, failure modes, mapping safety mechanisms, etc. Once the architectural FMEDA is set up, the integrated safety analysis engine can calculate the hardware safety metrics. A detailed FMEDA can be performed once chip design data becomes available.

Did you know you can perform architectural and detailed FMEDA using the Midas GUI?

The Midas GUI can open/save projects, create parts/subparts/failure modes, etc. You can generate safety reports and overview the complete safety hierarchy.

Are you curious about:

What does the Midas GUI launch window look like?
What are the different options within the GUI?
How to create an FMEDA project in Midas GUI?
What are the various areas inside the Midas GUI?
How to import the database in Midas GUI?
How to perform architectural and detailed FMEDA using the Midas GUI?

Too much to handle? Don't worry! We can help you sail smoothly in this functional safety journey and explore the Midas GUI world. We have created a series of short channel videos on Understanding Cadence Midas Safety Platform GUI and step-by-step instructions to perform architectural and detailed FMEDA using the Midas GUI available on our Customer Support site.

This channel contains videos demonstrating the GUI features of Cadence Midas Safety Platform. The videos explore the main launch window of the Midas GUI. The videos also showcase how to manage application themes and load project details. You get an overview of the main menu bar, quick access area, command line interface panel, main working area FMEDA context, and shared library.