EngineerZone Spotlight

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 ...

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...