Bristol has boosted its strong capability on safety critical and high integrity systems with a new research centre.
The city hosts the High Integrity Systems conference next month, looking at the latest challenges for safety-critical hardware and software with companies such as Rolls Royce, BAe Systems and Altran who all have major design centres in the region. The keynote is from Dr Dino Distefano, a software engineer at Facebook and Professor of Software Verification at Queen Mary, University of London.
WITTENSTEIN High Integrity Systems, based in Long Ashton, has also launched Checkpoints, as, a software Safety Component that can be added to its safety critical Real Time Operating System SAFERTOS. This provides sophisticated task monitoring for automotive designs using the ISO26262 standard for the highest ASIL C and D safety levels. This uses self-monitoring of the software to detect, identify and manage systematic faults.
SAFERTOS supports all the common architectures used in cars, such as Infineon’s AURIX Tri-core which also has a development centre in Bristol and controls a third of all the vehicles shipped in the world. The company also works with the Texas Instruments Hercules safety controller family and devices from NXP.
The city is also now home for a new Nuclear research centre. The South West Nuclear Hub at the University of Bristol brings together UK and international nuclear energy researchers working on the safe operation of current and future generation nuclear systems in the UK and around the world.
“Our objective is for the Hub to become an internationally recognised centre for nuclear research and education,” said Prof Tom Scott who co-leads the centre. “It will bring academic and industrial expertise together in an exciting multidisciplinary environment to address some of the major engineering, scientific and societal challenges related to civil nuclear power generation.
The hub builds on the success of the Bristol-Oxford Nuclear Research Centre (NRC), formed in 2011.
The High Integrity Software Conference takes place on 1 November at the Royal Marriott Hotel.
Shona Wright
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