Achieve safety and reliability of instrumentation and control FPGAs and SoCs for nuclear power plants and other industrial applications.
“We achieved IEC 61508 SIL 4 for the fault avoidance measures during development of the functional safety controller vCOSS S-zero®, a challenging endeavor for this type of equipment,” notes Masahiro Shiraishi, chief engineer at Hitachi. “We used a number of technologies to meet SIL 4 requirements, but equivalence verification using OneSpin’s EC-FPGA and EC-RTL was indispensable.”
The complexity of ASIC and FPGA chips integrated in instrumentation and control (I&C) equipment for industrial applications has increased dramatically over the last decade. While this provides additional capabilities, engineers needs to use state-of-the-art verification technology that can systematically detect functional bugs, including potential errors introduced by synthesis and other implementation steps. This presentation focuses on formal verification solutions that can provide high ROI in industrial applications. These solutions reduce the risk of undetected hardware issues, and enable a more predictable and efficient path to safety certification.