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Demystifying DO-254

Introduction: Interest in DO-254 first occurred in Europe and has since spread to the US commercial aircraft industry. If you are being asked about your company's DO-254 direction and compliance, but have been overwhelmed with information on the subject, then this article is for you. This article presents DO-254 for the novice, boiling down the standard, reducing it to its essential points so that you will be ready to respond with confidence, as well as understand its potential impact on your products or services.

What is DO-254? DO-254 provides guidance for design assurance in airborne electronic hardware to ensure safe function. It provides a framework of considerations for certification across the entire engineering lifecycle — but does not specify how to implement the standard. Thus, a cottage industry has formed to provide training and consulting, complicating the novice's task of getting smart quickly.

A few years back, the FAA issued AC 20- 152 that stated DO-254 must be used for programmable hardware (they included FPGAs as well as ASICs as programmable. At that point, the US commercial aircraft industry took serious notice. Europe has been involved in DO-254 even longer and their regulatory agencies apply a more rigorous treatment of the standard.

Content Highlights

Selecting Hardware Design Assurance Strategy

The Hardware Lifecycle

DO-254 fits the assurance process into a hardware lifecycle. While the specification covers this lifecycle in broad-stroke concepts, it does not mandate the actual process.

The Design Process

Requirements capture and tracing are key to DO-254. The documents and processes used for requirements are closely audited for certification. Many companies use tools to identify, record, and manage this process.

DO-254 addresses hierarchical, high-level and derived requirements. A derived requirement is an additional requirement inferred from the hardware development process.

The Support Process

In terms of DO-254, the validation process ensures that the derived hardware requirements are correct (rather than validation of system requirements).

Not all derived requirements have to be validated. Special attention is paid to those derived requirements relating to safety. The standard provides guidance for the validation process.

EDA Tools

EDA tools are essential to hardware design and can play a big role in helping to automate the DO-254 methodology.

Can an EDA tool be labeled as certified for DO-254 similar to a Good Housekeeping™ seal? No, there is no such thing as a DO-254-certified EDA tool. Each version of a tool needs to be qualified in the context of a particular project if required by the standard.

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