AMS nears production on ISO26262-standard products

October 10, 2012

UNTERPREMSTAETTEN, Austria--Analog IC provider AMS announced it's nearing volume production of its first ISO26262 functional safety standard automotive products.

AMS device applications with ISO26262 qualification cover electric power steering, pedal and position sensors. The first products developed along the standard are now approaching production release in early 2013.

Safety-related design activities at AMS have led to a large portfolio of advanced diagnosis IP such as

• Continuous integrity checks for on-chip-memory
• Self-test of the signal processing blocks
• Read-back of the status of device-drivers and outputs

Released in 2011, the ISO26262 standard is the major global regulation governing functional safety in road vehicles.  A growing share of safety critical systems under development in the automotive industry today follows this standard. The severity of a possible failure in an automotive system leads to the assignment of an Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) to it. Levels of A, B, C or D exist with D being the most critical.

The ASIL then in turn demands a maximum failure rate and a minimum percentage of “safe” failures with respect to all failures the system can have in operation. To ensure a high share of safe failures, on-chip safety and diagnosis functions are required for any semiconductor devices present in the system. The standard also provides a framework for the validation and documentation of the safety features implemented.