Robust and integrated diagnostics for safety systems in the industrial domain

The development of robust, safety critical systems with effective diagnostics is increasingly difficult, since hardware is getting more complex, code size is constantly increasing and soft-errors (transient errors) are becoming a dominating factor. It is difficult to reach the required safety integrity in future systems without improving the way diagnostic functions are handled today. Diagnostics are integral part of both hardware and software and it is crucial to design architectures with cross-connected and smart functions being able to detect dangerous errors in the system. While adequate safety is required by EU directives, the end customers require also high availability (uptime). This paper introduces a robust architecture that covers the requirements in order to build fault-tolerant and highly available systems for industrial devices.