HDL in safety critical applications

VHDL, Verilog and SystemC are HDL's

They describe hardware.... If you have a safety critical application you would have to design the redundancy into your HDL model.

You can insure the reliability of your design by:

1) Using a redundant polling method, where you have 3 identical logic paths and if two out of three paths agree that is your answer. 2) Run some built in self-test periodically to make sure the logic is what you think it is.

As far as I know there is no inherent safety protocols built into any Development software, you must define the safety factors into your design.

Eric

Miron Abramovici, Melvin A. Breuer, Arthur D. Fiedman "Digital Systems Testing and Testable Design", Wiley-Interscience, 1990.

This is a good book for designing Built in self test into you HDLs.

Eric