Xilinx tools facilitate development of FPGA applications for IEC61508

In industrial automation and electrical motors drives, functional safety applications are growing steadily driven by market demand and by the adoption of the IEC61508 Edition 2 [3]. This second edition specifically includes directives on functional safety designs for FPGAs. Compliance with IEC61508 directives in general may prove very challenging even for the most seasoned practitioners. The functional safety management process directives in the norm ranks the development tools in categories T1, T2 and T3 in function of the specific impact on the final FPGA design, the higher the number more critical the impact. T1 (data entry), T2(verification) and T3(transformation) type of tools. Design preservation, isolation design flow, the hierarchical design and associated floor-planning supplement the design flow to achieve added confidence on FPGA designs for functional safety. This paper address the isolation design flow as T2 tool aiming to decreasing the Beta factor βIC as required by the IEC61508 part 2 Annex E.