IEC 61508 TÜV-Certified Self-Diagnostic Software Reduces Development Time and Risk for System Designers
TOKYO, Japan, August 26, 2014 – Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced that it has obtained IEC61508 (Functional Safety) certification for the RX631, RX63N Safety Package, featuring a robust self-diagnostic software and a safety manual for microcontrollers (MCUs) necessary to implement functional safety in industrial equipment. An RX631, RX63N Safety Solution Evaluation Kit will be available in November 2014, providing a hardware evaluation board with the RX63N MCU, the evaluation version of the self-diagnostic software library, and a Users Guide.
Functional safety has become a growing reality for factories, equipment manufacturers, and automation OEMs to reduce economic losses due to equipment failures, production losses, and more importantly, threats to personnel safety. The European Machinery Directive (Note 1) 2006/42/EC mandates support for functional safety, and efforts to bring relevant industrial equipment into compliance with functional safety standards such as IEC 61508 have been moving forward. Functional safety is now implemented on multiple industrial equipment such as industrial motor drives, control equipment, industrial networking equipment as well as sensors.
Compliance with the IEC 61508 functional safety standard not only requires system designers to perform tasks referred to as safety analysis, such as failure analysis of safety-related hardware and study of failure diagnostic methods and their diagnostic yields, but also to meet defined regulations aimed at reducing specification and design errors in the development process of safety-related systems that can result in malfunctions. In particular, maintaining conformance at all stages of the software development process is a key issue.
Of the tasks that need to be performed by system developers, such as safety analysis and study of failure diagnostic methods and diagnostic yields, Renesas has already carried out the aspects related to the MCU. For the testing process, Renesas leveraged the IAR Embedded Workbench for RX certified for Functional Safety, which fulfilled the requirement for proof of tools safety certification. The tools from IAR Systems offer a complete and high-performance C/C++compiler and debugger toolchain and comprehensive documentation, including certificate, safety guide and report from TÜV SÜD. In addition, the Safety Manual includes the vital information such as FIT rates and SFF (Safe Failure Fraction) computation that can be passed on to a certifying body to reduce complexity in conformance.
Key features of the RX631, RX63N Functional Safety Package Solution:
(1) Self-diagnostic software library and safety manual for RX631 and RX63N 32-bit MCUs
The safety manual contains the results of safety analysis performed on each internal functional block of the MCU, and the self-diagnostic software library covers the CPU, RAM, and flash ROM. The self-diagnostic software uses fault simulation (Note 2) to obtain the diagnostic yields of CPU-related diagnostics. This provides a clear basis for diagnostic yields and contributes to more efficient development.
(2) IEC 61508–certified self-diagnostic software library for a simplified software development process
The self-diagnostic software library for the RX631 and RX63N MCUs has been certified as compliant with IEC 61508 SIL3 by the international certification authority TÜV Rheinland of Germany. When installing this software, the customer can omit the usual verification of conformance of the software development process required by the IEC 61508 standard.
(3) RX631, RX63N Safety Solution Evaluation Kit
The RX631, RX63N Safety Solution Evaluation Kit includes an MCU self-diagnostic software library, an evaluation board with the RX63N MCU installed on it, as well as the TÜV-certified IAR Workbench and compiler from IAR Systems. This will enable system designers to get started immediately with diagnostic software performance evaluation and initial system consideration.
With the new Safety Package, Renesas continues to deliver on its commitment to support customers in functional safety system development, offering more functional safety solutions for the industrial field, including a stronger lineup with support for industrial MCUs such as the high-performance, low-power RX100 Series. Renesas Electronics has also achieved UL 60730-1 compliance certification for hardware safety features on the RL78 MCU family.
(Note 1) European Directive on Machinery: A unified standard adopted by the European Union
that covers the distribution of industrial machinery products.
(Note 2) Fault simulation: An evaluation method that uses a fault simulator to determine the rate at which the self-diagnostic mechanism can detect hypothetical failures.
