UltraSoC and ResilTech partner to further functional safety in automotive systems

Improving the development of safe and secure ISO26262 and J3061 compliant systems

UltraSoC and ResilTech today announced a collaboration that brings together their expertise and technologies to further the functional safety compliance of automotive systems, focusing particularly on the ISO26262 standard. UltraSoC’s embedded analytics technology provides a powerful platform for developers who need to verify and validate the security and functional safety of their products, and to incorporate hardware-supported safety and security features such as anomaly detection and prevention of malicious intrusion.

UltraSoC’s approach is well matched with ResilTech’s significant experience in the design and validation of high integrity critical systems and in supporting companies to deliver products compliant to the most challenging safety standards, particularly for automotive applications. By working together, the two companies will dramatically simplify and improve designers’ understanding, deployment, and compliance with ISO26262 and other automotive safety standards.

The collaboration will also assist in defining and supporting implementation of security requirements in line with the SAE J3061 automotive cybersecurity standard, especially when it is necessary to evaluate and assess trade-offs between safety and security. J3061 assigns security levels to subsystems with different degrees of criticality. The standard calls for the monitoring and control of security though the entire product lifecycle from development and into usage in the field including the ability to monitor incidents and attempts to penetrate the system and to report such events.

UltraSoC’s embedded analytics improves verification and validation during automotive system development; and it can be used in deployed products to spot errors, both systemic and random, enabling a new level of safety and security functionality, and allowing in-field system health monitoring and advanced forensics. UltraSoC’s analytics infrastructure works in real-time, is independent of the main system and is non-intrusive. Embedded analytics also provides information and analysis, allowing designers to more easily satisfy the functional safety, risk assessment, testing, reporting and traceability requirements of standards such as ISO26262, SAE J3061, IEC 61508, EN50126/8/9 and CE 402/2013.

ResilTech SRL specializes in resilient computing for critical systems including automotive applications. It supports designers and companies developing hardware and/or software architectures and provides software components for safety relevant applications to be embedded at component or at system level. The company also holds a solid background in product and system verification and validation according to latest quality, safety and security standards.

UltraSoC’s architecture includes features specifically optimized for improving automotive safety and security, including a lock-step monitor which checks for consistency between redundant modules; and Bare Metal Security® (BMS), giving a hardware-based level of security “below the operating system”. BMS is extremely difficult for an attacker to detect or subvert, and supports the requirements of SAE J3061.

Aileen Smith, UltraSoC’s Chief Strategy Officer, commented: “We are very happy to be working with ResilTech, a company that lives and breathes functional safety. We are increasingly seeing how important UltraSoC’s embedded insights can be in monitoring disparate elements of complex, safety-critical systems such as those in automotive designs. We see tremendous value in working alongside the team at ResilTech which itself collaborates closely with organizations around the world to help improve functional safety and standards compliance.”

Rosaria Esposito, CEO, ResilTech, added: “UltraSoC has a thorough understanding of the importance of functional safety and the complexities of compliance to standards such as ISO26262. Its embedded analytics infrastructure offers invaluable insights into the workings and interaction of the various elements of a safety-critical system. We look forward to working closely with the team at UltraSoC to bring our combined experience and tools to further industry understanding, and to support automotive system developers.”

As part of their collaboration, ResilTech and UltraSoC will be giving a joint demonstration and presentation at the RISC-V Summit taking place in Santa Clara from 3-6 December.