The Long and Detailed Road to Automotive Compliance

April 4th, 2019 – By Ann Steffora Mutschler

Bringing an engineering organization up to speed with automotive safety standards is a long and arduous process. 

Complexity on complexity
Things can get complicated very fast. Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, said it is not uncommon in SOTIF applications to hear, “‘I’m going to do a system and it’s got cameras, and it’s got radars, and the radars have cameras, and there are sensors.’ It’s very complicated. People ask us how to protect against this and that, and how to ensure this thing works and what can be done in the interconnect to help with that. So we get pulled into these really high-level questions. And because an interconnect is configurable IP, and each customer’s design is totally different, we also get pulled into discussions around the process aspect to ISO 26262 when using configurable IP as opposed to a hard macro. These companies are asking us 1,001 questions about that, and it really is difficult. What we generally have to do is agree upfront that we are responsible for a specific part of the specification. And as a safety element out of context, we are responsible for this type of analysis and this kind of stuff; here are our assumptions of use and everything; and we agree on this. Any other insights we give to them is something we do to help them, but it’s not necessarily part of a contract or that’s required. The reason to have that agreement up front is because a lot of these companies are new to automotive, and we have a lot of experience, but we don’t want to be an ISO 26262 consultancy.”

For more information, please click and download this presentation; ISO 26262: What to expect from your chip or IP provider: https://www.arteris.com/download-iso-26262-what-to-expect-from-your-chip-or-ip-provider

To read the entire article on the SemiEngineering page, please click here: https://semiengineering.com/the-long-and-detailed-road-to-automotive-compliance/