Safety Critical Design

November 29, 2020 2:11 PM

• Correlated multipoint failure -

• When a design has a HFT (hardware fault tolerance) of X it means that it can tolerate X dangerous
failures and it still works. X+1 dangerous failures and it does not work anymore.
• Voting is defined as the number of paths that must work out of the total number of paths
available
Architecture Voting HFT Redundancy
1oo1 1 0 0
1oo2 1 1 1
2oo2 2 0 0
2oo3 2 1 1
2oo4 2 2 3
3oo3 3 0 0
• Fault Containment Region (FCR) - Faults within the region stays within and faults outside the
region stays outside
○ Applicable to software and hardware faults
• Design for safety assumes every system is unsafe by default and then it is up to the designers to
proactively show that it is safe
○ Steps involve
 Collect risks
 Assign risk severity
 Perform risk mitigation
 Develop software to acceptable level of integrity

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