Is the current DO-254 verification process adequate for the future?

Since its introduction in the year 2000, the DO-254 verification process has served the aviation industry well. However the complexity of the systems designed and verified by this process have become increasingly complex and the possibility of errors escaping the verification process has increased. Is the current DO-254 verification process adequate for the designs of the future? This paper investigates the state of art verification techniques used in the semiconductor industry and compares them to the DO-254 process. It is found that the semiconductor industry uses additional verification techniques such as constrained random testing, assertions and coverage metrics to achieve design assurance. The application of coverage metrics similar to those used in DO-178 is investigated and a verification flow for safety-critical hardware is proposed.