Designing for Functional Safety: A Developer’s Introduction

Welcome to your essential guide to functional safety, tailored specifically for product developers. In a world where technology is increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives—from industrial robots to autonomous vehicles—the potential for harm from product malfunctions makes functional safety not just important, but critical. 

This webinar cuts through the complexity to provide a clear understanding of what functional safety truly entails and why it’s critical for product success. We’ll start by defining functional safety not by its often-confusing official terms, but as a structured methodology for managing risk through defined engineering processes, essential product design requirements, and probabilistic analysis. The “north star” goals? To ensure your product not only works reliably but, if it does fail, it does so in a safe and predictable manner.

We’ll dive into two fundamental concepts: the Safety Lifecycle, a detailed engineering process focused on design quality to minimize systematic failures, and Probabilistic, Performance-Based Design using reliability metrics to minimize random hardware failures. You’ll learn about IEC 61508, the foundational standard for functional safety, and how numerous industry-specific standards derive from it.

The webinar will walk you through the Engineering Design phases: analyzing hazards and required risk reduction, realizing optimal designs, and ensuring safe operation. We’ll demystify the Performance Concept and the critical Safety Integrity Level (SIL), explaining its definition, criteria (systematic capability, architectural constraints, PFD), and how it relates to industry-specific priorities.

Discover key Design Verification techniques like DFMEA/DDMA and FMEDA, emphasizing how these tools help identify and address problems early in development. We’ll detail the FMEDA technique showing how design decisions directly impact predictions like safe and dangerous failure rates, diagnostic coverage, and useful life. Finally, we’ll cover Functional Safety Certification, explaining its purpose, process, and what adjustments to your development process can set you up for success.