SASHA reduces cost of development of safety critical systems

Last week, an important research project on functional safety just ended. Called SASHA (for Safety check of Automotive Software & Hardware Architecture), this two-year project driven by 6 partners was established to better understand the new standard for functional safety, ISO26262.
This standard was applied to a real case of the development of an E-Gas system in order to create a tool for an optimized development process. It also included the modeling of a novel 32bit-microcontroller (ASIL C/D compatible) in TLM (Transaction Level Model). Such modeling allows to make software for a new microcontroller before its final hardware is available and to check details of the interior behavior of the device without opening it.

Partners of the project were:
- STMicroelectronics, Research partner and Coordinator,
- Renault, Delphi, Knowledge Inside, Université de Compiegne and ESG France, Partners.

The project was initiated inside Systematic and Moveo clusters and was funded by the French DGCIS (Direction Générale de la compétitivité. de l’Industrie et de Services). The project ended with a big success. Indeed, the tool developed by Knowledge Inside is able to reduce development efforts and increase re-use especially in safety critical applications such as driver assistance, braking or electric power steering.

Using standard customization feature of its software, Knowledge Inside provided a ready to use environment with the following features :
- implementation of the ISO 26262 standard process according to needs of Delphi and STMicroelectronics
- functional and safety aspects are always kept coherent
- automated production of around 60 ISO 26262 specific reports
- integration with other tools used in the process such Excel, Doors, Simulink, Andorra.

Thus, the results of the work done in SASHA can help to reduce the overall cost impact of applying the new standard in functional safety.