Functional safety is a critical element in the design of any system that contributes to the safety of people or the environment. It enables the ability to detect, diagnose and safely mitigate the occurrence of a fault, ensuring the safe operation of a system in the event of error or malfunction. The costs of not considering functional safety as part of your design from the start can be significant, in terms of money, time and risk through the result of lengthy and costly qualification processes for safety relevant applications.
Arm has been and continues to be fully committed to providing the IP, software development tools, software test libraries, documentation and certification required for the successful, efficient development of a wide range of applications. But to truly demonstrate Arm’s commitment to functional safety, we are proud to announce the launch of our Safety Ready program.
Arm’s Safety Ready program is a collection of products across the Arm portfolio that have been through various and rigorous levels of functional safety systematic flows and development. The aim is to give customers the confidence that they are receiving reliable functional safety through consistent documentation, processes and features. Arm’s Safety Ready program helps to reduce risk and accelerate time to market whilst also fast-tracking the certification phase of the project.
We understand that product requirements can be different based upon the use case and system architecture. Arm works hard to ensure we implement the right features based on market and application requirements whether it’s for autonomous, Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) or Cockpit In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and Zonal Controller applications. This extensive portfolio of products are all documented and included in our Safety Ready program.
A great example of this is our latest product release, the Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU. Arm has added Split-Lock capability that allows the designer to develop high compute systems coupled with very high Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL). It adds the flexibility that wasn’t available in lock stepped CPU implementations, allowing the system to be configured either in a ‘split mode’ (two independent CPU’s that can be used for diverse tasks and applications), or ‘lock mode’ (the CPU’s are lock stepped for high safety integrity applications) at boot up. The Cortex-A78AE is just one of the newest Safety Ready product examples.
1. Reduces risk
Lowering the risk of any safety design is always crucial. Arm’s Safety Ready program means that no matter what product you take from our Safety Ready road map, you can design with the confidence that it has been through a very rigorous systematic design flow and process according to ISO 26262 or IEC 61508 standards.
2. Accelerates time to market.
Not only does the program help to speed up your development, as Arm has done a lot of work ahead of time to support your design, but it also helps to accelerate the assessment and certification phases of the design. The consistent documentation available to you from Arm supports your development and assessment activities and helps to accelerate the overall time to market for everyone downstream.
The Safety Ready program goes way beyond the CPUs that Arm offers. It truly spans the full portfolio of IP and also extends to software and tools, such as the Software Test Libraries (STLs) which are being delivered across selected Arm Cortex-M, Cortex-R and Cortex-A products. This is as well as the tools portfolio we have such as the Arm safety qualified C Compiler and the RTX5 safety certified real-time OS.
Arm is continuing to innovate to extend our portfolio in order to deliver the broadest functional safety capable IP portfolio in the industry. These new products will augment the Safety Ready program in the future to support accelerated system development and certification. These products can include CPUs, System IP, GPUs, security and Machine Learning products.
For more information please visit our Safety Ready page.
Safety Ready program