Advanced verification methods and safety critical hardware

Within the aviation industry RTCA DO-254 is the design assurance process for safety-critical airborne electronic hardware development. Safety-critical hardware (DAL A or B) requires the application of additional advanced verification techniques such as Elemental Analysis to ensure that elements of the design are adequately verified. This paper compares the verification processes currently used in the semiconductor industry to what is commonly used to meet DO-254 guidelines. Requirements based testing as specified in DO-254 is widely viewed as being inadequate to assure design correctness of complex hardware. Additional robustness testing techniques such as constrained random testing and assertions are typically used to improve the verification process. A methodology of subjecting the design to constrained random verification testing throughout the design process is examined. The applicability of this proposed process to DO-254 based design is evaluated.