Title: Challenges when designing FPGA’s for safety critical applications

Abstract: A critical system is one in which failure may lead to serious consequences for the user. Failure of safety-critical systems may endanger human life and failure of business-critical systems may result in serious economic loss. In such systems then, preventing failure is crucial. Our focus in this presentation is on the safety critical standards and how to deploy these when designing FPGAs.

FPGA has taken a central role in many designs and also in safety critical systems. New challenges arise when trying to design a safety critical system against a safety critical standard with limited support on how to handle FPGAs. There is somewhat a lack of consensus on how FPGAs can safely be deployed and certified according to a safety critical standard. FPGAs are treated as hardware in some standards and as software in some standards.

Roger Ericsson, ÅF, Sweden