When it comes to developing secure products, the IEC 62443 series of standards provide a lot of guidance and best practices which can be applied while developing the product. This is essentially an approach…
exida explains Blog
Risky Business: IEC 62443 and Legacy Products
The value of RPN Numbers in a DFMEA
I learned about the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) process for designs some decades ago. I was Supervisor of an Embedded System development group. There seemed to be a lot of evidence that…
Environmental Impact on Failure Rates
Good component failure rate data is a cornerstone of good quality reliability metric analysis. As mentioned in a previous exida whitepaper, one of the shortcomings of reliability databases has been the inability to handle variations…
Why is Memory Management important for Functional Safety?
What is Memory Mapping?
Memory mapping is a technique used in computer systems to manage memory resources safely, it involves creating a virtual address space that corresponds directly to the physical memory or to…
Why do we do probabilistic models to predict risk reduction? Check the box only?
I had an engineer from a European Certification Body ask me why exida would bother paying any attention to these failure rate numbers, especially on mechanical devices? He said that he does not know…
Have we reached peak C?
The C programming language has undoubtably extremely successful. It consistently ranks highly in the various rankings of most popular programming languages however these studies seem to be measured. C is not a language that…
What Does Root Cause Analysis Really Mean?
This is an intriguing question. One that I often ask my classes when I’m teaching our FSE100 Functional Safety course. Very often, they do not know or do not fully understand what this means and…
What is a Pragmatic Approach to Cybersecurity?
Now that we have a little bit of context on what's driving our current cybersecurity landscape. The next question is, “where does this pragmatic approach come in? What is a pragmatic approach? What does the…
Many Different Forces are Influencing ICS Cybersecurity Adoption
When we look at some of the challenges that are facing control systems, we also have to think about what forces are influencing how asset owners adopt cybersecurity. We'll talk about four of those main…
Machine Safety Goals
From a machine safety management perspective, what goals are you looking to establish? Building a company safety culture, building awareness of the hazards, building the "buy in" to do things right and do things…
Forces Influencing Machine Safety Adoption
What is driving machine safety adoption? What are some of the key questions that companies are trying to answer when it comes to machine safety? For industrial facilities, whether it's a chemical plant, or…
Benefits of Using IEC 62061 Machine Safety Templates
Why would someone consider purchasing templates as a starting point? First off, it decreases the amount of time and energy it takes to build out the program. If you think about starting from a…
The Importance Of Considering Common Cause with Redundant Systems
Common Cause is one of those variables that is not always considered important when it comes to SIL compliance. And yet, for redundant systems, it can have a significant impact on the PFDavg and Risk…
Why Functional Safety Management is Important for Machine Safety
Functional Safety Management (FSM) is important for a few key reasons. First, it governs the entire machine safety lifecycle. Regardless of which standards we pick, we need to have the management plan in place…
Machinery Accidents - Today’s Harsh Reality
During 2017, there were over 36,000 injuries related to machinery in the United States. There were 6200 non-fatal amputations, nearly 60% involving machinery. There were close to 3000 fatalities in 2019. Machine accidents are…