Cadence Introduces Comprehensive Safety Solution for Faster Certification of Automotive and Industrial Designs

SAN JOSE, Calif., 19 Oct 2021 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNS) today announced the Cadence^® Safety Solution, a new offering targeting safety-critical applications and featuring integrated analog and digital safety flows and engines for faster ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 certification. The solution, which includes a new failure modes, effects, and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA) offering called the Cadence Midas^™ Safety Platform, allows customers to perform FMEDA-driven analog and digital verification of safety-critical semiconductors for advanced automotive, industrial and aerospace applications.

As state-of-the-art electronics propel the automotive, industrial and aerospace industries into a future of more connectivity and autonomy, the development of safety-compliant semiconductors is critical. Developed to improve automation, confidence and productivity associated with achieving compliance to functional safety standards, such as ISO 26262, the Cadence Safety Solution offers new verification tools, including the Midas Safety Platform, vManager^™ Safety Manager and Xcelium^™ Safety Simulator. Additionally, the safety solution consists of existing verification, design, analog and digital tools, including the Cadence Jasper^™ Functional Safety Verification (FSV) App, Legato™ Reliability Solution, Spectre^® Simulation Platform, Genus™ Synthesis Solution, Innovus™ Implementation System, Modus DFT Software Solution and Conformal^® Equivalence Checker.

“Semiconductor development for automotive applications presents a host of challenges that the entire supply chain needs to address, including rigorous safety certifications required to achieve compliance with the ISO 26262 standard,” said Paul Cunningham, corporate vice president and general manager of the System & Verification Group at Cadence. “With the new Cadence Safety Solution, customers have access to the Midas Safety Platform, which fully integrates with Cadence design and verification flows, including vManager Safety Manager, Xcelium Safety Simulator, Jasper FSV App, Genus Synthesis Solution, and Spectre Simulation Platform, offering improved productivity and accelerated safety compliance.”

The Cadence Safety Solution includes flows and engines enhanced for advanced safety design and verification. The solution includes:

• FMEDA Management: The new Midas Safety Platform provides early phase exploration of functional safety architectures and leverages native chip design data to perform accurate safety analysis efficiently. The platform is a unified solution available across Cadence products, and with its modular architecture, supports both embedded or standalone usage with the Cadence flow.
• Fault Simulation: The new Xcelium Safety Simulator leverages Cadence’s leading native serial and concurrent fault simulation technologies to drive the highest performing safety analysis available. The simulator’s machine learning algorithms, coupled with the formal-based flow, dramatically accelerates the overall verification throughput.
• Fault Campaign Management: The new vManager Safety Manager offers functional and safety verification management integrated in one unified system for verification campaign management across all Cadence engines. Customers can experience a 3X turnaround time reduction for safety verification campaigns by leveraging vManager Safety Manager to orchestrate fault coverage across the Jasper FSV App and Xcelium Safety Simulator. Also, the vManager Verification Management platform offers customers connections to enable requirements traceability, while vManager Safety Manager handles safety verification in both analog and digital domains and automates reporting for required safety documentation.
• Formal Verification: The Jasper FSV App applies industry-leading formal techniques to fault analysis, reducing a simulation fault list by up to 30%, increasing safety verification performance.
• Automated Analog Functional Safety: The Safety Solution integrates the Spectre Simulation Platform and the Legato Reliability Solution to allow automated launching of analog and mixed-signal fault simulations for different failure modes and generation of functional safety diagnostic coverage reports with an annotation back into the Midas Safety Platform, accelerating functional safety closure.
• Automated Safety Mechanism Insertion, Optimization and Verification: The Safety Solution integrates the Genus Synthesis Solution, Innovus Implementation System and Conformal Equivalence Checker to guide the insertion of safety mechanisms, such as triple modular redundancy and dual-core lock-step safety islands, in the implementation flow, allowing customers to achieve safety requirements while optimizing for power, performance and area objectives.

"As automation advances in functional safety, the role of standardization from groups like Accellera Systems Initiative and IEEE becomes important," said Alessandra Nardi, senior engineering group director at Cadence. "The Accellera Functional Safety Working Group is defining a standard language to capture and exchange functional safety data that will significantly benefit interoperability and traceability. Cadence is contributing to the Accellera Functional Safety Working Group and supporting the IEEE P2851 efforts to continue the development of these standards."

The Cadence Safety Solution supports the company’s Intelligent System Design^™ strategy, enabling SoC design excellence through best-in-class tools and flows. For more information on the Cadence Safety Solution, please visit www.cadence.com/go/SafetySolution.

Endorsements

“Functional safety is increasingly critical in the design of modern automotive computing systems and remains vital to applications requiring a high level of reliability across the industrial and aerospace markets as well. The new Cadence Safety Solution to help in design and verification efficiency for various safety-related applications embodies the spirit of the Arm Functional Safety Partnership Program in providing reliable and integrated solutions to end customers.”

- Suraj Gajendra, senior director of technology strategy, Automotive and IoT Line of Business, Arm

"ASIL-B process and safety architecture were critical requirements in the development of our advanced AI processor when addressing automotive applications. The Cadence Safety Solution helped us achieve these goals by allowing us to perform early estimations of the safety metrics based on a predecessor design, enabling proper planning for safety mechanisms."

- Ori Katz, VLSI director and safety manager, Hailo

“In our Automotive SoC functional safety flow, we achieve ISO 26262 compliance by running fault analog simulations with customizable rules for optimized distribution, sampling size, monitoring and safety criteria. We use the Cadence Legato Reliability Solution to perform fault injection into our analog designs, run simulations and incorporate the results into our safety metrics. The solution integrates well with the Virtuoso platform, allowing us to reuse the testbenches and simulation environment setup. With this solution, we are able to meet ISO 26262 safety requirements with the necessary accuracy and flexibility with high productivity.”

- Yurii Toporov, design engineer, Melexis

“Simulating random faults in functional safety verification is a big challenge in industrial applications. Modeling the diverse nature of safety mechanisms adds significant complexity and requires reliable and flexible simulation tools. In providing flow automation, turnaround time optimization and quality of results, the new Cadence Safety Solution extends the existing Cadence Verification Suite and helps us achieve faster IEC 61508 certification.”

- Franck Roche, architecture, technical support, application and tools director, Microcontroller Division, STMicroelectronics

About Cadence

Cadence is a pivotal leader in electronic design, building upon more than 30 years of computational software expertise. The company applies its underlying Intelligent System Design strategy to deliver software, hardware and IP that turn design concepts into reality. Cadence customers are the world’s most innovative companies, delivering extraordinary electronic products from chips to boards to systems for the most dynamic market applications, including consumer, hyperscale computing, 5G communications, automotive, mobile, aerospace, industrial and healthcare. For seven years in a row, Fortune magazine has named Cadence one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Learn more at cadence.com.