Design assurance evaluation of microcontrollers for safety critical avionics

Abstract

Dealing with Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components is a daily business for avionic system manufacturers. They are necessary ingredients for hardware designs, but are not built in accordance with the avionics consensus standard DO-254 for Airborne Electronic Hardware (AEH) design. Especially for complex COTS hardware components used in safety critical AEH, like Microcontroller Units (MCUs), additional assurance activities have to be performed. All of them together shall form a convincing confident, that the hardware is safe in its intended operation environment. The focus of DO-254 is one approach called Design Assurance (DA). Its aim is to reduce design errors by adherence of prescribed process objectives for the entire design life cycle. The effort for certain COTS assurance activities could be reduced if it is possible to demonstrate, that the COTS design process is based on similar effective design process guidelines to minimize desgin errors. In the last years, semiconductor manufacturers released safety MCUs in compliance to the ISO 26262 standard, dedicated for the development of functional safe automotive systems. These products are COTS components in the sense of avionics, but they are also developed according to a process that focuses on reduction of design errors. In this paper an evaluation is performed to figure out if the ISO 26262 prescribes a similar DA approach as the DO-254, in order to reduce the COTS assurance effort for coming avionic systems.

Assurance Benefits of ISO 26262 Compliant Microcontrollers for Safety-Critical Avionics

“…The special characteristics of interest come from the development approach defined by the process requirements from ISO 26262. During previous research we made a comparison between the DA method of RTCA/DO-254 and ISO 26262-5 11 , which concludes that the ISO 26262 does not reach the same level of design integrity [21] 12 . The reason is that only safety requirements are considered in the development life cycle of the MCU, whereas the traceability down to detailed design level is not required.…”

Research on the Standard System of Avionics Component Management Plan

“…With the development of the aviation industry, the aviation field has put forward increasing requirements for the quality and reliability of avionics electronic components, and the requirements for the standards related to the management of avionics components have become more and more urgent. In order to guarantee to customers that all of the electronic components in the equipment of the plan owner are selected and applied in controlled processes compatible with the end application, Boeing first proposed the electronic component management plan (ECMP) in the 1990s according to the internal management document D6-55583, and established an avionics component management system with 25 major aircraft and aviation product manufacturing companies such as Honeywell, Airbus and British Airways [6,10] . Hereafter, ECMP is used as the basis for the operation of avionics manufacturers.…”