This is a question I have often been asked in the past. Most people I have spoken with don’t have a good appreciation of what this means and the purpose. From the
exida explains Blog
What is Prior Use Justification & How To Achieve it?
The Impact of SSI Selections in exSILentia® SILver™
An exSILentia user just reached out to me inquiring how their SIL verification results changed with changing Site Safety Index (SSI), even though they did not include the…
Functional Safety in Mining: Does it Apply?
This is an important question. Mining today is a lot more modernized and automated than in the past, yet there are still accidents occurring. The Impala hoist accident in South Africa in November of…
Threat Modeling: How to Succeed at this High Value and High Effort Cybersecurity Activity
Threat Modeling (TM) is a process for identifying and prioritizing potential cybersecurity threats to software, hardware or a system. Contributing to the high value of TM is:
- The ability to identify threats early…
FMEA Evolution – Has the essence of FMEA been lost?
Has your FMEA entered the realm of the paperwork exercise that we force ourselves to do for no real reason than someone says we must do it?
I have enjoyed analysis using FMEA. I…
How Does Mission Time Work with Proof Testing to Impact SIL Verification?
I have been asked this question many times by various clients over the years. This comes down to whether a perfect proof test is assumed or not. Let us remember that Mission Time is defined as…
FMEA Mistakes
I find YouTube to be a good source of information on many subjects. Want to know how to fix a widget? There are probably a few videos on that exact subject. Technical subjects are also…
Risky Business: IEC 62443 and Legacy Products
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…
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…