Mandated requirements for hardware/software combination in safety-critical systems

Safety-critical systems are an important subset of high-assurance systems. Higher performance requirements have led to the increased use of combined hardware/software systems therein, with hardware devices taking processing load off software. As might be expected, safety-critical systems have many requirements made of them by established standards. By implication, and now by emerging safety standards, such requirements must be discharged over hardware/software combinations, with important ramifications for best practice. In this paper we discuss the impact that such requirements have on the co-development of hardware/software combinations, and suggest adaptations of existing best practice that could discharge them