Ted Marena, Microsemi
embedded.com (June 19, 2018)
As the quantity of industrial equipment controlled by electronics grows, so do concerns over the equipment failing and causing personal harm and property damage. Safety functions are built into equipment to prevent functional failure and ensure that if a system does fail, it fails in a nonharmful way. Examples of safety systems in industrial equipment include train breaks, sensors monitoring hazards to air quality or the physical environment, assembly line assistance robots, and distributed control in process automation equipment, just to name a few. These systems often include field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that, when supported by safety data packages for calculating failure rates, can play a pivotal role in streamlining safety assessments. When these devices are also flash-based and therefore immune to single event upsets (SEUs), FPGAs enable safety system developers to dramatically simplify their designs.
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