Automotive functional safety

In this blog post, let us discuss about one of the most common myths that is associated with functional safety. We often hear that ‘nothing’ needs to be done for ASIL-A and a Quality Managed (QM) development of the software is sufficient to achieve ASIL-A compliance. Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth. Let us deep dive a bit to understand what QM means, what ASIL-A means and what difference exists between these two. Knowing the deeper meaning of these terms will help us to see where the boundary of QM stops & where ASIL development starts. As an additional bonus, we have also thrown in the difference between an ASIL-A & ASIL-B development so as to scale up the discussion around this topic.  As mentioned earlier, QM refers to ‘ Quality Managed ’. What this means is that the development process follows a standard and repeatable methodology for the development of the system. An example for such a methodology could be Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or ASPICE. S

"Lets get the Implementation done, and go out to an agency like XYZ, find out about the paper work and get our work certified" This is a language we have heard being spoken several times. MYTH 1: Functional Safety is just "paper work"! Fact: Functional Safety is the discipline of designing Safety into every stage of the product life cycle starting right at the concept phase For some one who has just started with functional safety, and refers the standard, this can be overwhelming: The 2nd edition of ISO26262 has 12 Parts 37 Clauses > 100 Work products! Here is a mindmap of the different work products needed (those starting with x.5.x) Why do we need so many work products? This is because Functional Safety is designed into - every phase of the product life cycle - processes as well as technical methods - every stage of every phase In other words, the Standard spans the entire breadth and width of how a safety-relevant product is built, right from concept till

Myth 1: No Safety was implemented before ISO 26262   Fact: Automotive Systems have always had Safety measures and mechanisms in place Cars have been around for a century and ISO26262 for not even a decade! Cars have always had several safety features such as brakes, airbag, seat belts, tire pressure monitoring etc. But its not that just these features were implemented and nothing additional was done for Safety before the standard was published. Way back in the 1960s, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety and Regulatory standards such as FMVSS were introduced. This standard and its equivalents specified rules to avoid crashes, and contain impact during a crash. Additionally, Independent organizations like IIHS in the US evaluated several aspects of safety such as crashworthiness and crash avoidance and gave ratings to promote safety considerations in cars. These led to specifying requirements for Safety for components, System and design features.  Automakers have always been interested in the to