Predictive Health Monitoring In Functional Safety

Functional safety first became a major issue for the semiconductor industry in 2011 with the introduction of the ISO 26262 standard for implementing functional safety in the automotive industry. Before that, functional safety had already been standardized in a general manner for all industries since the end of the 1990s in IEC 61508. However, in the field of industrial automation, where the IEC 61508 is mainly applied, safety systems have tended to be - and still are - built discretely. It is only in recent years that integrated circuits have started to emerge here - one that is clearly being driven by experience in the automotive sector. This is evidenced not least by how many developers in other industries, including those whose development work is not carried out in accordance with ISO 26262, reference Part 11 of the standard. Part 11 was published in 2018 and explicitly addresses its application to semiconductors. Another way in which the automotive industry has had an outsize influence on developments in the field of functional safety is strong cost pressure as well as weight and size limitations, combined with high unit volumes.