Stefan Häusler

Supporting qualification: Safety standard compliant process planning and monitoring

Functional safety of embedded systems has become an integral part in automotive engineering activities due to the forthcoming safety standard ISO 26262. One main challenge is to perform development activities compliant to the standard and provide the respective documentation. Traceability between requirements from a standard, as well as project-specific process and product artifacts throughout the entire development cycle allows compliance assessment to support qualification. This paper proposes a methodology to plan and monitor the safety development process. Using a formalized requirements library of the ISO 26262 as well as a system description and its safety integrity level, a standard compliant process model is derived describing all necessary steps in the development process. Based on this process model, the methodology allows monitoring process activities and their degree of implementation, based on standard compliant confirmation measures. The main benefit is the reduced effort in preparing qualification or certification of a new safety-critical product. The development of an Adaptive Cruise Control system is sketched as an example application to illustrate the proposed proceeding.

Towards process change impact analysis in industrial engineering

Today, the development of large systems, is more and more based on new model driven design methods that try to overcome gaps between the engineering domains. These design methods are often allocated to the design phase to avoid deep process iterations. Their impact on the process outcome can be tremendous but is not well understood. Existing impact analysis methods frequently fail to provide the required flexibility and capability that are necessary to analyze the impact of design methods in terms of precision and efficiency. Therefore, new analysis methods and models that allow an appropriate impact estimation of such design methods on the product development process are required to provide an adequate information basis for profound management decisions. This paper derives requirements from a use case for an impact analysis of new design methods in product development and investigates the gap between the existing state-of-the-art and the derived requirements.

Real-time quality estimation to enable process evaluation in integrated circuit development

Nowadays, managing product development projects becomes more and more challenging. Following Moorepsilas law, especially the semiconductor industry develops products of increasing complexity while minimizing time-to-market and maintaining high quality standards at the same time. Therefore, there is a strong need to improve the productivity of digital design projects. However, to be able to do so a quantification of productivity as a metric of inputs and outputs of the development processes is needed. For this reason, this paper focuses on the quality of products under development to describe one aspect of the output of design projects. A method for real-time product quality estimation of integrated circuits based on an integrated requirements and quality model is introduced. Ontologies are used to define the integrated model. The method is implemented in the performance measurement framework Permeter.

Strukturorientierte Bewertung des Produktumfangs

Im vorherigen Kapitel wurde der Wert der Messung des Produktumfangs aber auch die Schwierigkeit dieser Messung deutlich. Die vorgestellten Ansatze aus der Literatur basieren vorwiegend auf Erfahrungswerten und Voraussetzungen, die nicht in jedem Unternehmen ubereinstimmen. In einem bestimmten Bereich bewahrte Kennzahlen des F&E-Controllings, z. B. die Anzahl der getesteten Module, konnen nicht ohne Prufung auf andere Bereiche oder Unternehmen ubertragen werden.

Chip Design Process Optimization Based on Design Quality Assessment

Nowadays, the managing of product development projects is increasingly challenging. Especially the IC design of ASICs with both analog and digital components (mixed‐signal design) is becoming more and more complex, while the time‐to‐market window narrows at the same time. Still, high quality standards must be fulfilled. Projects and their status are becoming less transparent due to this complexity. This makes the planning and execution of projects rather difficult. Therefore, there is a need for efficient project control. A main challenge is the objective evaluation of the current development status. Are all requirements successfully verified? Are all intermediate goals achieved? Companies often develop special solutions that are not reusable in other projects. This makes the quality measurement process itself less efficient and produces too much overhead. The method proposed in this paper is a contribution to solve these issues. It is applied at a German design house for analog mixed‐signal IC design. Th...

Requirements for Ontology Based Design Project Assessment

Ontologies are formal knowledge representation. Looking at ontologies in more detail can offer concealed details on the ontology or the conceptualized domain. This requires technologies for ontology analysis. By analysing the use case of R&D management this paper identifies typical metrics on ontologies and evaluates metric calculation mechanisms.