Chris Hobbs talks with Elecia about safety critical systems. Safety-critical systems keep humans alive. Writing software for these embedded systems carries a heavy responsibility. Engineers need to understand how to make code fail safely and how to reduce risks through good design and careful development. 

The book discussed was Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems by Chris Hobbs.

This discussion was originally for Classpert (where Elecia is teaching her Making Embedded Systems course) and the video is on Classpert’s YouTube if you want to see faces.

There were many terms with letters and numbers, here is a guide:

• IEC 61508: Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems; relates to industrial systems and forms the foundation for many other standards 

• ISO 26262: Road vehicles - Functional Safety; extends and specializes IEC 61508 for systems within cards

• IEC 62304 specifies life cycle requirements for the development of medical software and software within medical devices. It has been adopted as national standards and therefore can be used as a benchmark to comply with regulatory requirements.

• MISRA C: a set of software development guidelines for the C programming language 

• DO178-C and DO178-B: Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification are the primary documents by which the certification authorities such as FAA, EASA and Transport Canada approve all commercial software-based aerospace systems

• ISO/IEC 29119: Software and systems engineering -- Software testing

• ISO 14971:2019 Medical devices — Application of risk management to medical devices

• IEC 62304:2006 Medical device software — Software life cycle processes

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