Concept for a safety-controller based on uncertified hardware

This work suggests new solutions for safe systems in industrial applications. Nowadays automation systems get more complex, so the microcontroller has to be replaced with a more powerful CPU. The preferred solution is to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) general purpose CPUs. The hardware has to be analyzed in detail to estimate the behavior in case of a fault. With state-of-the art processors this is not possible anymore. A concept to avoid this is “coded processing” as mentioned in the stan-dard for industrial safety systems IEC 61508 [1]. The goal of this research is to analyze a concept which meets the demands of the IEC 61508 safety integrity level 3 (SIL 3) only based on software techniques to avoid any hardware analysis and dependencies. The evaluation of the concept is done by theoretical analysis based on fault models found in literature. The practical tests are done by a fault injection software which is developed in the course of this research.