Software Validation for Safety System based on IEC61508

Abstract

In the past, for safety lot of hardware (HW) circuity was added in different HW components of the system. After the Industry 4.0 upheaval, safety became an integral part of any system used for industrial application. A Safety Monitor IP can be added as common hardware IP, which can be reused across generations of systems. This paper shows how system security is increased by adding a safety monitor SW stack to the system and will also discuss on how this SW stack is validated. A system is taken for testing with a safety monitor as an internal intellectual property (IP), which will monitor all the safety critical components of the system and test them periodically for any error/failure. The aim is to detect and handle any failure as soon as possible, reducing the risk factor to an ignorable point. To further increase the coverage of safety monitor, a host SW stack is used that runs on the Real-Time Operating System. This host SW stack will also run some periodic checks on a different set of safety critical components of the system and report it to our safety monitor. This whole validation will be aimed at meeting the compliance with IEC 61508 norms.