A Safety Analysis Framework for COTS Microprocessors in Safety-Critical Applications

The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) microprocessors in safety-critical applications poses many challenges for system safety engineers. Due to liability and intellectual property concerns, important details, such as the register transfer level (RTL) implementation of the microprocessor, are often unavailable to those qualifying systems for use in safety-critical applications. Therefore, engineers must rely on high level specifications and other documents in order to prove the safety of using these microprocessors. In this abstract, we describe a microprocessor safety analysis framework that may assist engineers facing this situation. This framework focuses on demonstrating the logical correctness of microprocessors by verifying their features. The five steps of this framework are feature identification, feature risks analysis, feature modeling, feature verification, and safety analysis.