High-performance next-gen semiconductor functional safety tools

Optima also announced the commercial release of its Optima Safety Platform with an initial range of automated solutions for hard-error (permanent) and soft-error (transient) fault analysis, coverage maximisation and structural analysis. Based on 27 person-years of development, the Optima Safety Platform is already in evaluation at leading automotive semiconductor providers.

Jamil Mazzawi, Optima’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said: “Functional Safety Verification is a critical requirement for multiple industry sectors, spearheaded by the Automotive ISO 26262 Functional Safety Standard. However outdated and inadequate tooling has rendered the required safety analysis process inordinately time consuming and complex, making it hard and almost impossible to achieve ASIL-D on big and medium size chips.

“Optima has engineered a fundamentally new technology that provides a fresh perspective for this development phase, shortening schedules from months to days while simplifying the analysis process and dramatically improving coverage, a key quality metric in ISO 26262, opening the path to ASIL-D.”

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Nazareth, Israel, Optima is the recipient of a European Union Horizon 2020 Grant of €2.5 million, as well as other financing. This has allowed the company to retain leading semiconductor tool development and safety experts.

A singular focus on automotive safety has led to the development of a proprietary fault analysis algorithms that forms the basis of semiconductor safety verification. By accelerating this process by orders of magnitude, Optima is positioned to become the leading safety solution vendor for automotive and other industry segments.