2 Industry Standards for Automotive Functional Safety

To make sure that the vehicles we drive are safe and reliable, the industry has developed a set of standards for Functional Safety. The most widely recognized standard in the automotive industry is ISO 26262, which provides guidelines for the design and development of the safety-critical systems for the road vehicles. The standard defines functional safety as “the absence of unreasonable risk due to hazards caused by malfunctioning behavior of electrical and electronic systems.”

ISO 26262 defines a development process including the use of risk assessment, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and fault tree analysis (FTA). The standard also requires the use of safety mechanisms, such as redundancy, to make sure that the system can operate in a fail-safe manner.

The goal of ISO 26262 is to confirm that safety is integrated into the entire development process and that safety is considered in all aspects during the design of the vehicle. The standard regulates the system hardware and software through every step of the product life cycle, including development, production, operation, service, and decommissioning. The standard is also intended to provide a common framework for the development of safety-critical systems across the industry.

Texas Instruments’ (TI) involvement with such international standards organizations helps to establish that the company develops products with Functional Safety as a priority from the beginning of the design process.