EngineerZone Spotlight

Hello EngineerZone Users, We are excited to launch our Springtime Warrior program. Starting May 6th, we will be releasing six new badges for a limited time in EngineerZone. These badges are worth 1,850 points and can only be obtained in the months of...

I don’t know when the automotive guys decided to start using the acronym FuSa to mean functional safety. I brought it up once at an IEC 61508 international committee meeting in Vienna and only one member present said they had even heard of the ...

A requirement to meet the “state of the art” in safety is given in various standards and laws. This is a term which I didn’t fully understand so I went looking for more guidance on it. This blog is a compilation of what I discovered...

I have sat in a standardization meeting for an hour while the wording of one sentence was debated to everybody’s satisfaction. I have also sat in meetings where we debated what the existing standard means. Despite the effort what is written is ...

It is very hard to have a serious discussion on any topic if we can’t agree on what words mean. In particular, definitions are important and of course the relevant terminology. In an upcoming blog I plan to cover how standards are written, but ...

Back in 2016 Analog Devices announced they were acquiring Linear technology - the result, an enormous power portfolio. Some of these circuits can carry more than 100 amps to servers used in data centers, others include galvanic isolation and oth...

In a previous blog I compared ISO 26262 to IEC 61508. In this blog I will concentrate on the new part 11 of ISO 26262. ISO 26262 revision 1 was released in 2010 and while it had useful guidance on semiconductors it has taken it to the next level in r...

In response to the uptrend in applications demanding impedance measurements –the relationship between the voltage and current flowing in a circuit, ADI has developed impedance measurement ICs like the AD5933 and ADuCM350, which have found broad...

I took my present job as the Functional Safety person for Analog Devices industrial products over six years ago. However before that I spent nine years in our automotive group where I learned a great deal about automotive EMC and started my functiona...

I recently joined several industry colleagues at Analog Garage, ADI’s technology incubator, to discuss the continued evolution of autonomous transportation. This is a topic we’re all immersed in daily and realize is shaped by several obst...

Is your Digital Transformation Too Heavy on the Digital and Too Light on the Transformation? A Path Forward. If you’re reading this, you’re likely among the 63% of business leaders having difficulty scaling a Digital Transformation. Altho...

FPGA are very useful devices which are often designed into our customer’s designs along with things like ADCs or power ICs from Analog Devices. FPGA can implement microcontrollers and any glue logic required. In this blog I will discuss some of...

In this two-part blog I am going to outline my own journey with IoT, IIoT, the cloud and cloud to cloud communications. IEC 61508 was published in 1998 and then revised in 2010. There is very little on it regarding new technologies including the clou...

For the second blog in a row I must advise you not to miss the video at the end even if your tire of the main topic before the end of the blog. It’s a good one and shows a man in action who really believes in safety. I do admit however it has n...

Network Perimeter – The Wall is Coming Down. The Digital Revolution is driving an unprecedented level of connectivity outside the traditional Enterprise Network. Here are some examples that illustrate the point: 68% of business application wor...

Verification and validation are important but separate topics within functional safety. However, the terms of often misused and mixed up including in a recent draft functional safety standard I was reading. In a nutshell, validation is the final veri...

by Vincent Roche, President & CEO, Analog Devices, Inc. As we turn our focus to 2019, it is natural to take stock of the events and trends of the past year and consider how they will influence and shape the coming year. As in years past, ...

The Internet of Things (IoT) – A Deluge of Devices. By all accounts, there will be 30-50 billion internet-connected devices by 2020. This is a massive cyber-attack surface to protect. The number of devices expands by the thousands every day; cr...

You couldn't build a house without tools and software is no different. IEC 61508 talks about two types of software tools. Online tools which run as part of the application and offline tools used during the development or manufacturing phases. Onl...

If you read my last blog, your notifications should be completely tailored to your communication preferences for EZ. We are now excited to unveil another customizing opportunity for our members. YOUR PROFILE! Our members view each...

The Digital Revolution is here. It’s been called the Internet of Things (IoT), or even the Internet of Everything. Applied to Industry, it’s called the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Industry 4.0, and the Digital Enterprise. Regard...

The temptation to jump in and start coding is always great. For both safety and security if you take this approach you may pay for it later. Designing a proper software architecture can... Simplify interfaces Reduce the amount of code which has to b...

I won’t go so far as to say that functional safety guys hate software but sometimes you would be forgiven for thinking so. From a safety point of view, software is deemed to have too many states and is said to be un-testable. Figure 1 - A book...

In our last blog, we walked you through the new look of EngineerZone (EZ), offered some helpful tips, and showed you what you could expect as a new or returning EZ user. One tip, in particular, was how to receive and customize email notification...

Some of the most important semi-conductor information in IEC 61508:2010 is in in part 2 Annex E. This annex was added in the 2010 version of the standard and will be revised for revision 3 due out in the 2021/22 time frame.       &nbsp...