New SafeTI functional safety design packages from Texas Instruments

Functional Safety is a huge concern for many applications, ranging from aerospace to railways, furnaces to nuclear power stations, and cars to industrial control to medical equipment (to name but a few). Thus, in order to help customers get to market quickly with their safety-critical applications, Texas Instruments (TI) has just announced its SafeTI design packages. (I do like a good play on words, and you must admit that "SafeTI" is just about as good as it gets -- it says what it means and it sticks in your mind.)

This functional safety platform augments TI’s 20+ years of safety-critical design expertise and includes design packages with analog devices and embedded processors – from microcontrollers to digital signal processors – as well as software, supporting documentation and independent third-party evaluation and certification.

SafeTI design packages are suitable for a broad range of products in markets including industrial, automotive, transportation, energy, medical and many others, to accelerate safety-critical product development.

Also announced today are new SafeTI-61508 design packages that include 15 Hercules RM4x ARM Cortex-R4 safety microcontrollers  and the complementary TPS65381-Q1 multi-rail power supply from TI for industrial, medical and energy motor control applications.

SafeTI design packages include five key components for functional safety:

1. Functional safety-enabled semiconductor components developed as safety-standard-compliant items to help enable designers to build safe systems with confidence.
2. Safety documents, tools and software to decrease development and certification time.  SafeTI documents include a Safety Manual detailing product safety architecture and recommended usage, Safety Analysis Report including details of safety analysis and Safety Report summarizing compliance to targeted standards.
3. Complementary embedded processing and analog components work together to help designers meet safety standards.
4. Quality manufacturing process has been applied to help assure that SafeTI components meet the component-level requirements concerning ISO9 001 and/or ISO/TS 16949 (including AEC-Q100 for automotive), helping the customer deliver robust solutions.
5. Safety development process that follows ISO 26262, IEC 61508 and IEC 60730 requirements, which is assessed by auditors as prescribed by safety standards.

Taking functional safety development to the next level
SafeTI design packages provide help to manage both systematic and random failures, enabling customers to design their functional safety systems. Using SafeTI components makes it easier for customers to achieve compliance to safety standards and get to market quickly in rapidly growing, safety-critical markets:

• Automotive designers can use SafeTI-26262 design packages for component-level compliance to ISO 26262 safety requirements to support ASIL-A to ASIL-D for applications such as steering, braking, transmission, electric vehicle battery management and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).  TI is a member of U.S. and international working groups for ISO 26262.
• Transportation, industrial and medical designers can use SafeTI-61508 packages for component-level compliance to IEC 61508, which supports standards from SIL-1 to SIL-3 and system-level compliance to SIL-4 for industrial controllers, remote input/output (I/O), human machine interface (HMI), safety/shutdown and process machinery and others.  These packages also can also help designers in safety products, such as railway train control, signaling and braking, medical infusion pumps, respirators and ventilators.
• Household appliance designers can look to SafeTI-60730 for software that is certified to IEC 60730 /UL1998 for household appliance designs such as washing machines, refrigerators and household electrical controls, because these packages comply with IEC 60730 standards and support Class A to Class C requirements.
• SafeTI-Quality Managed (QM) products are developed under a rigorous development process and come with a Safety Manual and Safety Analysis Report for evaluating system components.  SafeTI-QM components include embedded processors, power management devices, motor drivers and many other analog components.

Development tools, software and support for safety-critical development

• Compilers for Safety: The SafeTI ARM  Compiler Qualification Package establishes confidence in development tools. The kit will help you document, analyze, validate and qualify your use of the TI ARM compiler to help meet the requirements of the ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 standards.
• GUI-based peripheral configuration tools: SafeTI HALCoGen graphical user interface works to configure peripherals, interrupts, clocks and other µC parameters and generates peripheral and driver code. Developers can use this to accelerate development on new projects and can import this into TI’s Code Composer Studio integrated development environment (IDE) v.5 and select third-party IDEs.
• MCAL and Safe AutoSAR for ISO 26262: Designers can get the Microcontroller Abstraction Layer (MCAL) 4.0 from TI and Safe Automotive Open System Architecture (AutoSAR) from TTTech/Vector. ISO 26262 AutoSAR support is available from Vector and Elektrobit.
• Certifiable RTOS Support for IEC 61508: Real-time operating system support is available from Wittenstein high integrity system’s SAFERTOS, Micrium’s µC/OS, Express Logic’s ThreadX and SCIOPTA RTOS.

Find out more about SafeTI design packages
Click Here to see a Video Overview of SafeTI design packages

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