EngineerZone Spotlight

It is a situation to which everyone can relate; you are sitting in a favorite chair, a lamp glowing brightly above as you read a book or magazine. Suddenly, someone in your house starts vacuuming or using a hair dryer. The light, once warm and bright...

Functional safety for software is covered by IEC 61508 part 3. Typically, software than runs on uC, uP and DSP is written by the applications people who buy our chips. But what about software that runs on integrated circuits and is supplied by an IC ...

Today’s blog is about a new amplifier from Analog Devices. Amplifiers are pretty special to ADI since they were the first products we ever made, back in 1965. This is reflected in our company logo which features a tilted triangle - the schemati...

I have started questioning proposals that use safety as a justification. As an example, back in May my company recently updated their safety policy regarding car parks? One of the new rules is that you must reverse into your parking spot. I&rsqu...

"In the past few years the field of electronics has expanded at a phenomenal pace, and predictions are that it will continue to grow at an accelerated rate for some time to come…. and has opened this field to possibilities of astounding p...

My last blog was on the costs of implementing functional safety. Those costs apply on the factory floor or for IC being developed for an automation safety system. But what about the costs of not implementing safety? The cost of not implementing the c...

Okay, so though the title might make this sound like a Steven King story, rest assured there are no buckets of blood or homicidal clowns lurking about. Yet the words “Feature Creep” can ruin a perfectly good day for power supply designers...

Everybody wants to make money on what they sell. Companies that don’t make money quickly disappear. The FFC (full factory cost) of a product depends on both the development cost to produce the very first product and the manufacturing cost for e...

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line – unless, as this video dramatically demonstrates, you are a drone and a high-voltage power line hangs along that straight line. Less dramatic, but no less important for worker safety,...

Functional safety has requirements to cope with both random failures and systematic failures. Software only has systematic failures since software doesn’t have random failures and since if the same circumstances arise a software fault will usua...

Heat is the sworn enemy of the efficient factory floor. Against this foe designers of control systems in manufacturing environments as diverse as beverage bottlers to petrochemical plants battle constantly. They seek efficiency improvements and conti...

In recent blogs I covered how to read standards and how to understand the terminology used in standards. In this week’s blog I would like to give you information on how to access standards and where it's possible read them for free. In a future...

I have taken the title of this blog from the book of the same name published in 1993 and written by Lauren Ruth Wiener. I loved the title and when I saw it could be bought second hand on Amazon.com for less than $5 I bought it (I just checked and it ...

Hello EngineerZone Users, We are excited to be launching our Summer Warrior Campaign July 31 - August 31. We will be rolling out five new badges for you to earn for a total of 850 points. We appreciate the participation we received from our members i...

Standards such as the robot safety standard ISO 10218-1:2011 mandate hardware fault tolerance (HFT). While the title of the blog contains a question mark I for one have strong opinions as to whether mandating such hardware fault tolerance is good pra...

My last blog was on CCF (common cause failures) and this one is on a handy technique for reliability modeling including CCF known as Markov modeling. As a refresher a CCF generally involves all the channels in a redundant safety system failing a...

When time permits I like to do these blogs well in advance and in batches of at least 3 or 4. In this batch I plan to discuss CCF and related topics because I recently had to give myself a refresher on the topic as part of discussing IEC 61508-2:2010...

The definitive guide for where to geek out while attending a conference in Boston.

Sometime ago I did a functional safety and the cloud part 1 blog, and I promised part 2 on the guidance available within the standards for cloud-based safety; if such a thing is even possible. It turns out there is quite a bit of guidance available, ...

A reliability prediction for the die in any released Analog Devices product can be seen at www.analog.com/ReliabilityData by entering the part name. Similarly the reliability prediction can be done for a process node e.g. 0.18u. These predictions are...

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 ...