Semiconductor Engineering: ISO 26262:2018, 2nd Edition: What Changes?

by Kurt Shuler, On Feb 12, 2019

ISO 26262:2018, 2nd Edition: What changes?

February 7th,  2019 – By Kurt Shuler

The safety standard is now clearer for IP-based designs and those happening across multiple companies.

If you’re involved somehow in design for automotive electronics, you probably have more than a cursory understanding of the ISO 26262 standard. What your organization is working from is most likely the 2011 definition. The most recent update is formally known as ISO 26262:2018, less formally as ISO 26262 2nd Edition.

Standards should evolve, but what changed and why? I’ve been a member of the ISO 26262 working group for many years, and particularly involved in how it should be interpreted for IP, and I’ve got to tell you, I have struggled. 

From my perspective, it was originally written around an implicit expectation that chips are built from scratch entirely within one organization, and this is a dated assumption. There was also not enough guidance for IP-based design or design distributed across multiple companies or sites. The workaround for an IP supplier has been to use the Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) mechanism. But this depends heavily on human interpretation, by the component vendor on what may be relevant to the integrator and vice-versa, with little guidance from the 2011 version of the standard. I complained (whined?) quite a bit to the committee about these problems and they eventually invited me to the working group. I wasn’t the only one confused and other people joined, and we seem to have had an impact; our efforts have resulted in a lot more clarification, organization and practical examples in the latest standard. I think the new Part 11 of the updated standard provides a lot more detail and useful examples for us in the semiconductor and semiconductor IP industry.

For more information about ISO 26262:2018 Part 11, download the 39-slide Arm TechCon presentation titled, “Fundamentals of ISO 26262 Part 11 for Semiconductors,” by Arteris IP Functional Safety Manager Alexis Boutillier and ResilTech Scientific Advisor Dr. Andrea Bondavalli, or watch my very popular SemiEngineering “Tech Talk: ISO 26262 Drilldown” video.


To see the entire on the SemiEngineering page, please click here:
https://semiengineering.com/iso-262622018-2nd-edition-what-changes

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