How do you design signal processing hardware for safety-critical systems?

1 What is a safety-critical system?

A safety-critical system is a system that can cause serious harm or damage to people, property, or the environment if it fails or malfunctions. Examples of safety-critical systems include pacemakers, aircraft navigation, brake systems, nuclear reactors, and fire alarms. Safety-critical systems have strict requirements for reliability, availability, performance, and fault tolerance, and they must comply with relevant standards and regulations.

3 How to design signal processing hardware for high reliability?

The second step in designing signal processing hardware for safety-critical systems is to ensure that the hardware can perform its intended function without failure or degradation under normal and abnormal conditions. This means that the hardware should have high reliability, which is the probability that the hardware will operate correctly for a given period of time. To achieve high reliability, you can use techniques such as redundancy, diversity, error detection and correction, self-testing, fault isolation, and graceful degradation.

4 How to design signal processing hardware for high availability?

The third step in designing signal processing hardware for safety-critical systems is to ensure that the hardware can be ready and accessible for use whenever needed. This means that the hardware should have high availability, which is the proportion of time that the hardware is operational and not undergoing maintenance or repair. To achieve high availability, you can use strategies such as modular design, hot swapping, spare parts, preventive maintenance, and fault recovery.

5 How to design signal processing hardware for high performance?

The fourth step in designing signal processing hardware for safety-critical systems is to ensure that the hardware can meet the functional and non-functional requirements of the system. This means that the hardware should have high performance, which is the measure of how well the hardware can process the signals according to the specifications and constraints. To achieve high performance, you can use approaches such as optimization, parallelization, pipelining, buffering, filtering, and feedback control.

6 How to design signal processing hardware for compliance and verification?

The fifth step in designing signal processing hardware for safety-critical systems is to ensure that the hardware can comply with the applicable standards and regulations, and that it can be verified and validated for its correctness and suitability. This means that the hardware should have compliance and verification, which are the processes of checking and proving that the hardware meets the expectations and criteria of the stakeholders and authorities. To achieve compliance and verification, you can use methods such as design reviews, testing, simulation, modeling, analysis, and certification.