Arguing the safety of FPGAs within safety critical systems

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are common in electronic systems and are being increasingly used in safety critical and safety related systems. The primary standards for complex electronic hardware in safety critical systems are primarily intended at developers to achieve approval of the device by the certification body, rather than to explicitly argue safety, although many of the activities will be common. Whilst there is ongoing research into various aspects related to FPGA safety, overarching safety arguments are required to link these areas. This paper identifies how faults/failures can arise in FPGA development and proposes an approach for arguing safety. This approach is intended for use by safety assessors and has been applied to a number of assessments.