Functional Safety for DO-254

The purpose of this track is to provide engineers or technical leads with basic understanding of DO-254 key concepts. DO-254 has been around for over 15 years and has been applied almost exclusively in the commercial Aerospace industry. Because it has been focused on a subset of the electronic hardware market, many engineers and companies have little to no knowledge of DO-254.

Metastability is a serious problem in safety-critical designs, frequently causing chips to exhibit intermittent bugs that may not be caught until an in-flight failure. Traditional simulation does not accurately analyze multi-clock designs and relies on a manual, error-prone process. This paper describes the automated clock-domain crossing verification solution DO-254 projects need and tool assessment tips.

DO-254 defines a process that hardware vendors must follow to get their hardware certified for use in avionics. All in-flight hardware (i.e., PLD, FPGA or ASIC designs) must comply with DO-254. This document focuses on the issue of advanced verification and tool assessment for DO-254, specifically for the Siemens EDA Questa Formal Verification tool.

If you are a hardware design or verification engineer, you probably have a good idea of what verification entails. However, add compliance to RTCA/DO-254 as a requirement, and suddenly the definition of “verification” may not be so clear. First, the term “verification” must be understood alongside the synergistic term “validation.” Next, in a DO-254 context, verification spans a wider scope than it does traditionally, so understanding this is crucial.

This paper seeks to take the mystery out of the use of formal methods for hardware verification. We will first explain formal methods as clearly and concisely as possible. We will then look at the state of the industry and the changes over the last decade or so that have enabled the widespread use of formal methods for hardware verification. Finally, we will bring this information together and provide recommendations for using formal methods on a DO- 254 project.

This paper seeks to take the mystery out of the use of formal methods for hardware verification. We will first explain formal methods as clearly and concisely as possible. We will then look at the state of the industry and the changes over the last decade or so that have enabled the widespread use of formal methods for hardware verification. Finally, we will bring this information together and provide recommendations for using formal methods on a DO- 254 project.

Tools used in the design and verification of electronics have played a massive role in the dramatic evolution of these devices over the past few decades. After all, there is a limit to the amount of work and detail that even a good aerospace engineer can handle, but add the use of tools, and the sky (pun intended) is the limit.

Engineers can use Model-Based Design for requirements analysis, algorithm design, automatic HDL code generation, and verification to produce airborne electronic hardware that adheres to the DO-254 standard. The proposed Model-Based Design approach for DO-254 combines tools from MathWorks® and Siemens EDA for both design and verification. This workflow supports development phases from concept through implementation, streamlining development, and reducing costs.

The adoption of tools into safety-critical workflows is often challenging as these new technologies must demonstrate sufficient safeness to use before being deployed in production environments. The demand for High-Level Synthesis capabilities within DO-254 projects is growing and this paper describes the requirements and considerations to successfully use High-Level Synthesis within a DO-254 workflow.

The primary focus of DO-254, referred to as ED-80 in Europe, is hardware reliability of airborne electronic hardware. DO-254 is considered state of the art and compliance is compulsory for any company putting an IC on an aircraft. One component of the standard is the verification of functional behavior.

Document DO-254 provides aerospace and defense companies with the needed guidance to develop and verify airborne electronic hardware. Some clients use products like Siemens’ Questa to fulfill vital verification objectives of DO-254 such as hardware behavior simulation and code coverage as a means for elemental analysis. But did you know a simple checklist can also be an effective DO-254 verification tool?