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Q&A: Franck Galtié, Director of BU Automotive Functional Safety at NXP

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Franck Galtie
Franck Galtie
03/15/2019

As part of Automotive IQ’s Safety and Security Series, the ISO 26262 to Semiconductors conference was held in December 2018 in Germany. The event tackled the safety challenges of the semiconductor with discussions aimed at sharing the latest updates on ISO 26262 Part 11.

Also on the agenda was improvements of semiconductor usage in safety-critical systems, discovering innovations in highly automated driving that the semiconductor sector can benefit from, and more.

One of the conference's guest speakers was director of BU Automotive Functional Safety at NXP in Toulouse, France, Franck Galtié. Here are his thoughts surrounding the issues raised at the conference:

Your role is involved with the development processes to the standard of ISO 26262. What is your precise involvement when it comes to this standard?

My main role related to the ISO 26262 is to keep our internal processes up-to-date. For instance, this includes updating the procedures to match to the future edition two of ISO 26262, or to manage the external certification of our NXP process for each and every new release.

The 2018 edition of ISO 26262 now includes Part 11 especially for semiconductors. What value does this chapter add for you in your work?

As a semiconductor company, this new part 11 of Edition 2 brings a huge added value. This is the best way to ensure common understanding and application of the ISO26262 while developing our components.

For the semiconductor industry, interpreting and applying the ISO 26262 standard in a cost-efficient way is challenging. What is, in your opinion, the greatest challenge?

In my opinion, our greatest challenge is to rationalize our safety concept to minimize die size impact and use fault injection at multiple levels to maximize the efficiency of safety mechanisms. A much better ratio between HW and SW safety mechanisms is also key to success.

The trend towards autonomous and electric vehicles adds complexity to semiconductors. How do you at NXP prepare for this?

I believe that understanding the system and vehicle architectures in combination with a strong functional safety, security and quality culture are key to be successful in autonomous driving and electrification of the powertrain. In fact, NXP has a strong network of partners that we work with to develop solutions in these areas, to provide automotive reference designs to help customers develop and design in autonomous driving and electrification.

  • Franck Galtié was a speaker Automotive IQ’s 2018 Application of ISO 26262 to Semiconductors conference, which took place in Munich, Germany. For information on all of our forthcoming conferences, check out the Events page.

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