Functional safety has been a niche area, and there are only a few functional safety engineers who ensure that technical requirements are met, and that their design teams follow the guidelines and processes outlined in the functional safety specifications for aeronautics, automotive, and military applications.
But functional safety has seen a rapid transformation over the last couple of years amid the relentless advances toward autonomous vehicle platforms. And while self-driving cars are a work in progress, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are already here, and functional safety is an intrinsic part of ADAS designs. In fact, ADAS is more about vehicle safety than anything else. The features, such as blind spot detection and lane departure warning, are a case in point.
That makes “functional safety” a buzzword in automotive design circles and functional safety experts a highly sought-after commodity. What’s important to understand is that functional safety isn’t merely another function or a new technology product; it embodies a new safety culture and demands people who genuinely believe in it.
A closer look reveals that automotive functional safety is building a whole new ecosystem around the ISO 26262 standard for the safety of electrical and electronics systems in automobiles. ISO 26262, formulated in 2011 as an international standard, was the automotive industry’s response to the constantly rising safety demands in increasingly automated vehicle designs.
It’s a unified and automotive-specific standard that details the requirements for incorporating functional safety into automotive designs. ISO 26262 specifies actions and techniques throughout the product development cycle at system, hardware, and software levels. It also defines four Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs) to determine applicable requirements for mitigating risks and damage: ASIL-A being the most basic and ASIL-D the most stringent.
A New Safety Culture
As mentioned above, automotive functional safety is a new and evolving segment, so the whole industry is learning about it with a growth mindset. It starts with people having sufficient functional safety knowledge; ISO 26262 mandates that functional safety managers (FSM) are tasked with promoting safety culture across the organization and safety engineers are certified as functional safety practitioners.
Here, companies like Exida and Resiltech are offering corporate and individual training as well as certification programs for ISO 26262. And while training mostly involves engineers, it also includes executives, marketing personnel, documentation teams, quality assurance managers, and others.
Next, when it comes to creating a certified ISO 26262 process, new players like Atlassian and Jama Software are cashing in on a big focus on functional safety-centric processes. Atlassian Jira, for instance, offers a tracking toolset for functional safety implementation processes and Jama’s tools link items and activities within a functional safety process.
Clearly, functional safety is becoming a key priority for all players in the automotive supply chain: Car OEMs, Tier-1 electronic system designers, chipmakers, IP suppliers, EDA outfits, and tool providers. Add to that the arrival of the second edition of ISO 26262 later this year, which is expected to bring a lot of updates, including support for buses, trucks, and motorbikes.
Moreover, the details on how to handle the development of autonomous vehicles are being outlined in a new standard that will follow the second ISO 26262 release. The ISO/PAS 21448 standard is commonly referred to as Safety of the Intended Functionality or SOTIF.
Therefore, every company in the automotive design value chain will need to have a few functional safety champions. They are going to be tasked with defining functional safety roadmaps in future design architectures and train people involved in the development of products with functional safety features.
The functional safety champions in a company will ensure that design teams have processes in place that engineers can follow. Furthermore, they will make sure that the company culture rewards the person who finds a hidden flaw.
The engineering jobs for automotive functional safety are growing with a big focus on process and culture. That calls for a new breed of technology professionals that help create a culture in which team members have a sufficient level of skills, competence, and qualifications to ensure that functional safety is adequately designed into automotive systems.
The future opportunities for functional safety architects are quickly growing; type ‘functional safety jobs’ on Google and see yourself.
