The assessment of low-cost safety-critical microelectronics

The costs of approval testing, safety-critical microelectronics can be reduced by: (i) using automatic test procedures as much as possible for the quantitative part of the approval testing procedure; (ii) initiating the approval procedure at the earliest possible stage in the development; (iii) assessing the system configuration in close cooperation with the design engineer, who has to `defend´ his design; (iv) concentrating on the prevention of systematic errors instead of detecting them; (v) using systematic techniques to analyse the system configuration by isolating and classifying the safety-critical functions and components and the safeguards; and (vi) addressing the assessment from the safeguards standpoint rather than the potential faults. This method has been used now by VEG-Gasinstituut for about four years and has proved to give reliable results in a very efficient way