Keysight’s Advanced Design System Achieves ISO 26262 Certification, Ensuring Functional Safety in Automotive Development

As the automotive industry continues to innovate and we see fully autonomous vehicles on the horizon, maintaining safety and standardization in manufacturing is crucial. There are several standards that official bodies and associations have published to address this, and the standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a major player in this field.

One of the key requirements is the ISO 26262 certification, which sets standards and governs a vehicle’s electrical and electronic components and their testing by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The core principle behind ISO 26262 is to ensure passenger and pedestrian safety with the vehicle. It outlines a set of specific requirements that need to be met by the safety function of the system, as well as by the processes, methods, and tools that are used throughout the development process. As more manufacturers look to comply, Keysight’s Advanced Design System (ADS) has recently achieved its ISO 26262 certification from TÜV SÜD (tool classification level 1).

Growing demand for safety assurance

“The automotive industry is experiencing rapid innovation, and manufacturers are looking for ways to speed up their designs while ensuring safety remains paramount,” said Joe Civello, ADS Product Manager at Keysight. “We are committed to ensuring our customers have the tools and technology they need to design with confidence and the ISO 26262 certification further cements this. We are pleased to be able to show and validate to our customers that we can support them throughout their entire journey from concept through to creation. ADS is already widely leveraged by customers worldwide, but its compliance with this standard further underscores our commitment to safety, quality, and assurance.”

Manufacturers need to ensure that their components are certified before going into a vehicle and as a result, there is a domino effect which necessitates that the design tools, production tools, and associated processes are also ISO 26262 certified.

Keysight’s Advanced Design System

The certification of Keysight’s ADS gives manufacturers the full assurance they need. ADS is an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software for designing and simulating analog, radio frequency, high-speed digital, power electronics, and quantum circuit components. It includes a design editing environment for creating circuit schematic and physical layouts. The designs created can then be simulated with a variety of circuit, electromagnetic and electrothermal simulators employing different analysis algorithms. The simulated results are then displayed in a data display environment for the user to decide if the design specs are met before committing to real hardware implementation.

With the certification in place, it demands that ADS can detect erroneous output or faulty operation so that customers don’t use incorrect data to construct faulty hardware. The fault detection process requires the simulated data to be compared to data obtained with a different simulation technology or by comparing to actual hardware prototype measurements. The existence of these fault detection comparisons is what enables ADS to be ISO 26262 certified.

End-to-End Assurance

In addition to ADS, Keysight has already achieved ISO 26262 certifications for several products including the Keysight IP Management (HUB) and the Keysight Design Data Management platform. This offers customers complete end-to-end assurance if they are taking advantage of Keysight’s full suite of products for managing design data and IPs.