Software - safe?

Safety engineering surrounds everyone of us in every day life: starting with the elevator in office buildings, the roller coaster at the fun fair, automatic doors or subway signals or even the airplane that "flies by wire". Functional Safety Management compliant with international standards like IEC 61508 is a prerequisite for systematic software development:

• requirements engineering
• interaction design and usability tests
• HW/SW codesign
• concurrent engineering
• test planning and performance monitoring
• unit tests and test automation
• configuration and change management

It is not sufficient to verify the correctness of software for functional safety systems once and forever. For the sake of product safety the product needs to be verified change after change. It is more efficient to implement a management of functional safety from the very beginning, which is compliant with IEC 62304, ISO 60601, IEC 13485 or ISO 26262 or any other relevant standard within your application domain. Standard development processes like SPICE or CMM(i) will not do it.

Software - reliable?

The difference between software and mechatronics is vital. Software has one big advantage – it will not age or suffer from wear and tear. But in conclusion, errors in software originate from design and implementation, so to speak they are built in – unfortunately.

Using software nowadays to control mission critical applications to compensate for hardware failures can be done by different methods:

• redundancy to compensate failure of hardware and electronics
• diversity to eliminate common cause failures
• disgnostics to increase the level of confidence and boost availability

Functional safety systems developed by infoteam software are the result of innovative yet solid engineering services combined with redundant, fault tolerant software architecture in applications like:

• industrial automation >>
• medical devices and life science >>
• power generation and distribution >>