Ensuring End-to-End Traceability for Safety-Critical Applications

The Midas Safety Platform – OpsHub Integration

By Francesco Lertora and Robert Schweiger

Manufacturers and suppliers face the ongoing challenge of designing systems that are not only innovative and feature-rich but also resilient and trustworthy, upholding the strictest safety standards to protect passengers and road users alike.

Functional safety is critical in the automotive sector, as it pertains to the safety of systems that must reliably respond to inputs, even in the presence of faults. It focuses on minimizing the risk of harm due to malfunctioning electrical and electronic systems within a vehicle. The ISO 26262 standard is an international regulation that governs the functional safety of automotive electronics and software systems. It encompasses the entire vehicle development lifecycle, from concept and design to production and operation.

ISO 26262 supports the whole product safety lifecycle: from management, development, and production to service. Throughout the development process, the standard covers all safety-related aspects in great detail, including requirement specification, design, implementation, integration, verification, validation, configuration, production, services, operation, and decommissioning.

The ISO 26262 process flow begins with a Concept Phase involving Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) to determine Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs). Afterwards, Functional Safety Requirements and a Functional Safety Concept (FSC) are defined for developing the system, hardware, and software, followed by rigorous Verification and Validation (V&V) activities at each phase. Especially, Failure Mode Effect and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) and safety verification are key methods in developing safety-critical systems. Finally, a Functional Safety Assessment confirms compliance by the assessor before production and operation.

Clearly, this is a complex process flow involving many tools from various vendors. Therefore, a seamlessly integrated and automated flow is essential for back-annotating results and ensuring the full traceability of data across different tools throughout the safety process flow. Manual interventions should be avoided to reduce the risk of failure.

The Cadence Midas Safety Platform enables an early-phase FMEDA to explore functional safety architectures and perform accurate safety analysis. The Midas platform is tightly integrated with the Cadence Verisium Manager Safety, which provides a unified fault campaign management to automate and manage complex fault injection campaigns using real chip design data. However, while results such as diagnostic coverage values can be automatically back-annotated from Verisium Manager to the Midas platform, there is no direct interface between the Midas platform and popular requirements management systems (RMS) or product lifecycle management (PLM) tools such as DOORS, Jama, Jira, Codebeamer, Polarion, and others.

One of the industry's most urgent demands is managing the entire automotive functional safety lifecycle, from concept to product development, including safety metrics verification. Cadence has partnered with OpsHub, a leading provider of intelligent application mesh solutions, to ensure seamless integration with top enterprise PLM and requirements solutions.

This is where the OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM) comes in. OIM is a centralized integration hub, providing a single interface for managing and monitoring all data flows across enterprise systems. This allows teams to configure, track, and troubleshoot projects in real-time.

Integrating the Midas platform with the product ecosystem ensures end-to-end traceability. Designers can analyze the performance of chips or circuits under various failure conditions and trace their safety requirements from initial product specifications through design and manufacturing. It also enables seamless tracking of the verification process for safety mechanisms, ensuring that each one is fully tested and validated.

The Midas OIM integration helps manufacturers identify potential risks at every stage of the safety process and implement appropriate safety measures. This includes redundancy, fault-tolerant architectures, and rigorous safety verification, ensuring vehicles meet the stringent requirements for safety-critical systems in today's increasingly automated and connected cars.

By leveraging Opshub technology, the Midas platform can connect with many different systems through a single, centralized interface. For example, bi-directional synchronization between safety mechanisms defined in technical safety requirements in JAMA and Midas can be established.

In the Midas platform, safety mechanisms can then be mapped to failure modes, followed by a safety analysis, and proceed to safety verification running in Verisium Manager Safety or even implementation by leveraging the Genus Synthesis Solution and Innovus Implementation System. Safety mechanisms can also be created within the Midas platform and synchronized with JAMA safety requirements. The OpsHub Integration Manager can manage look-up tables between the interfaced systems to configure requirements field translation and guarantee the maximum level of traceability.

The Midas synchronization functionalities are enabled through the Midas Server and API, which also allows safety projects to be shared in a multi-user scenario. We extended the Midas API to work with the OpsHub Integration Manager so that when a Midas application client connects to the Midas Server, it can benefit from automatic synchronization.

Connecting to the RMS using OpsHub technology is an important step toward evolving the Midas Safety Platform. We aim to support users throughout the functional safety lifecycle, from concept to product development.

Learn more about Cadence's Midas Safety Platform and read the OpsHub press release.