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An Israeli company, Optima Design Automation has introduced two tools for automotive design. The Optima Safety platform consists of Optima-HE and Optima-SE, both based on the company’s Fault Injection Engine (FIE) and designed for fault analysis, targeting safety analysis fault injection for SoC design.
The FIE uses parallel simulation and formal verification, rather than fault simulation, and introduces fault list pruning and collapsing for design optimisation.
The Optimta-HE is for hard error analysis and the Optima-SE is for soft error analysis to accelerate ISO 26262 verification.
Founder, Jamil Mazzawi, explained that the tools are designed to meet fault simulation for ASIL-D, the highest level of safety for autonomous vehicles.
“Up to now, automotive ISO 26262 fault analysis has made use of traditional, slow
fault simulation technology [and] using 30-year-old algorithms and methods,” he said. The EU co-funded company deviates from this by developing new algorithms designed to accelerate fault simulation. The company claims that the automated analysis can reduce verification from months to days
Optima-HE uses the FIE to analyse large design code bases and perform fault analysis for stuck-at-1 and stuck-at-0 hard-errors. It identifies design faults in autonomous vehicles that are not trapped by a safety mechanism and for which failure could lead to personal injury. It is based on the ISO 26262 standard categorisation and supports development teams to predict an accurate metric for fault coverage to achieve an ASIL-D rating.
The CoverageMaximizer feature identifies areas that are not adequately tested and which need to be covered.
Optima-SE uses the FIE to perform soft error analysis on transient faults. Rather than flip-flop hardening, it applies fault analysis to identify a sub-set of the design’s flip-flops which can be hardened for transient fault resistance, while minimising flip-flop circuitry.
The company’s tests have shown that soft errors can be run on a customer design, using a commercially-available CPU at x1,000 times faster than conventional RTL simulation.
Both Optima-HE and –SE are available now. CoverageMaximizer will be released in March 2020.
