Safety and Mission Critical

Achieve functional correctness

Achieving functional correctness is obviously key in any mission or safety critical application, where great sums of money or even lives are at stake if the chip should malfunction. Therefore, engineers go through great effort to make sure that no bugs escape the verification process. In addition to a powerful simulation environment like Modelsim, Questa, and Veloce, engineers look for additional means to get greater confidence in the correctness of their designs through extensive Assertion-Based Verification (ABV) methodologies and tools like Questa Formal Verification. With many of the designs also requiring multiple asynchronous clock domains, a solution like Questa CDC is also indispensable.

Accurate/complete requirements tracking

For complex electronic hardware destined to fly on commercial aircraft, the FAA, via DO-254, requires an external audit of the tracing of requirements to design implementation code and verification results. This level of requirements tracing is also emerging as a contractual item for safety and mission critical applications across a variety of industries including space, military, transportation, and medical. Mentor provides automated requirements tracing from enterprise requirements tools, such as DOORS ™, to design implementation and verification results, to help ensure timely delivery of a verified design implementation while meeting regulatory and contractual mandates.

Meeting DO-254 requirements

Specifically in the avionics industry the requirements recently mandated by the FAA pose great challenges. Mentor has a dedicated program to help customers achieve adherence to the DO-254 requirements, with a rich set of tools that assist in achieving compliance with these requirements. More information on how to meet the DO-254 requirements can be found on our DO-254 pages.

Pre-silicon system validation

Specifically in mission and safety critical applications, designers need to validate the complete system, i.e. hardware and the software, before committing to tape out or FPGA production. Mentor offers a set of solutions that range from system behavioral modeling to support for transaction-level analysis in Vista. Hardware/software co-verification at the RTL is available using Seamless and high capacity and performance emulation using Veloce.

Digital and analog integration

With analog components virtually present in every chip, an accurate, high-performance solution for mixed signal verification is a must. In the Mentor verification platform this is provide by Questa ADMS and the ICAnalysts CB set of products. Their seamless integration with the Questa platform ensures a full simulation solution for all abstraction levels, including analog.