Rapid safety evaluation of hardware architectural designs compliant with ISO 26262

The international standard ISO 26262 “Road vehicles - Functional safety” claims qualitative and quantitative analysis of hardware designs at the appropriate level of abstraction. For large-scaled hardware designs, these evaluations have to be initiated early in development adequate to hardware architectural design and not delayed to hardware detailed design at the level of electronic schematics. Therefore, we describe a structural modeling and annotation of failure data for hardware architectural designs. Based on a top-down qualitative fault tree analysis, the classification of hardware failure modes in context of system behavior can be determined according to ISO 26262. Using these classifications and assumed failure rates, we facilitate a rapid quantitative safety analysis regarding evaluation of the hardware architectural metrics and evaluation of safety goal violations.