An automatic approach to perform the verification of hardware designs according to the ISO26262 functional safety standard

With the increasing adoption of embedded systems in critical automotive applications, the verification of hardware designs reliability is becoming a strictly regulated process where the ISO26262 standard plays a key role. Today crucial verification activities such as failure analysis and FMEA are still relying heavily on reliability engineer expertise, as automatic methods supporting them are still lacking. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that allows to automatically perform failure analysis considering the hardware schematic of the item under analysis, or safety-element-out-of-context, and a behavioral model of the software the hardware executes. An automotive case study is presented to illustrate the approach, and some preliminary results are discussed.