Cadence Introduces Automotive Functional Safety Verification Solution, Reducing ISO 26262 Compliance Preparation Effort by up to 50 Percent

Cadence Incisive platform enhanced with new fault injection verification management for functional safety compliance

SAN JOSE, Calif., 22 Oct 2014 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS), a leader in global design innovation, today introduced its new automotive functional safety verification solution, which reduces the effort required by automotive designers to prepare for ISO 26262 compliance by up to 50 percent. An expansion to the Cadence® Incisive® functional verification platform, the new fault injection and safety verification technologies help automotive engineers automate ISO 26262 compliance for traceability, safety verification and tool confidence level (TCL).

The integrated Cadence Incisive functional safety solution reduces the compliance effort by automating the time-intensive manual verification process of fault injection and result analysis for IP, System-on-Chip (SoC) and system designs. The solution includes the Incisive Functional Safety Simulator and the Functional Safety Analysis capability in the Incisive vManager™ solution. The new simulator operates within the Incisive Enterprise Simulator compiled-code engine, boosting runtime performance up to 10x and providing the seamless reuse of the functional and mixed-signal verification environments to accelerate the time to develop safety verification versus the interpreted Incisive Verifault-XL engine traditionally used in functional safety simulation.

The ability of safety systems to detect faults is the critical measurement for ISO 26262 compliance. The Functional Safety Analysis capability allows the safety engineer to automatically generate a safety verification regression from the fault dictionary created by the simulator and enables the Incisive vManager solution to track millions of detected, partially detected, and undetected faults introduced into simulation to verify the safety systems in a design. By automating the tracking of these safety metrics, the Incisive functional safety solution automates man-years of effort, and provides the traceable audit trail needed in the systems design chain from semiconductor to OEM suppliers.

"At Melexis, we pride ourselves on achieving the highest standards for the safest, most innovative, and technically-advanced automotive sensors and semiconductor systems,” said Philippe Laugier, Digital Competence Center manager at Melexis. “While ensuring safety is a time consuming and costly process, it is paramount in the automotive market and ISO 26262 compliance is required to ensure it. By automating functional safety verification, Cadence provides a solution that significantly reduces the effort compared to existing approaches.”

“Addressing functional safety challenges, particularly in automotive electronics, is critical for the success of system and semiconductor companies,” said Charlie Huang, executive vice president, Worldwide Field Operations and System & Verification Group at Cadence. “By partnering with companies like Melexis who embrace functional safety today, Cadence is delivering a solution that enables engineers to more efficiently address one of the key requirements to proliferate fault-tolerant electronics in the automotive industry where the safety of consumers is paramount.”

The Incisive Functional Safety Simulator and Functional Safety Analysis technologies are part of the Cadence System Development Suite (SDS), addressing the largest and most complex verification and hardware-software co-development challenges faced by semiconductor and system companies.

Availability
The Incisive functional safety solution is currently in limited customer availability. General customer availability is expected in the first half of 2015. For more information, visit www.cadence.com/news/safety.

About Cadence
Cadence enables global electronic design innovation and plays an essential role in the creation of today’s integrated circuits and electronics. Customers use Cadence software, hardware, IP, and services to design and verify advanced semiconductors, consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer systems. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., with sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world to serve the global electronics industry. More information about the company, its products, and services is available at www.cadence.com.