November 25th, 2019
ISO 26262-5 requires the determination of hardware safety metrics, including SPFM and LFM. Latent and residual diagnostic coverage are also important metrics to assess the effectiveness of safety mechanisms. Achieving ASIL-B, ASIL-C or ASIL-D compliance is challenging, and requires a detailed analysis of faults in the safety mechanisms. This paper introduces a systematic, largely automated process to compute safety metrics. It covers accurate fault analysis in safety mechanisms with and without error-correcting capabilities. The approach scales to large SoCs, provides accurate results, and significantly reduces the need for manual analysis and fault simulation. Experiences and results of its application to a number of gate-level netlist designs are reported.