Functional safety

Functional safety is rapidly growing in importance. It is more formally known as ISO26262: Road Vehicles – Functional Safety. This ISO standard was first released in 2011 and the current version was released in 2018. ISO 26262 is an adaption from an earlier standard named IEC 61508, which was a functional safety standard that applied to all industries. These standards have many similarities, but ISO 26262 was derived to only focus on road vehicles.

The purpose of functional safety is to ensure that automotive software (and hardware) operates as intended or defaults to some known safe state. With increasing complexity in automotive software and hardware and with increasing reliance on technology (for example, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and electronic controls), mission-critical software needs to operate as intended. Functional safety is about reducing the risk of failures that could lead to accidents. The functional safety standard accomplishes...