Functional safety verification is one of the most critical issues for automobile development. Safety-critical automotive chips require compliance to ISO 26262 ASIL requirements, extending far beyond functional verification. New features in autonomous driving, advanced driver assistance, drivetrains, and active/passive safety systems rely on advanced SoCs, and complete, fully-documented safety verification of these components is critical for their acceptance into automotive systems.

Automotive safety verification must work in concert with functional verification, and requires new perspectives and approaches. Even if a feature has been implemented perfectly, and thoroughly verified to be in conformance to its functional specification, this is by no means sufficient for functional safety compliance—functional verification does not take faulty behavior caused by random defects that may occur during the lifecycle of the component into account. Functional safety verification explicitly models faulty behaviors caused by random defects, and verifies that the safety mechanisms built into safety-critical automotive SoCs properly manage these behaviors.