exida Ireland

IEC 61508 - Functional Safety for Design & Development (Electrical, Mechanical, Software)

Jan 20 - Jan 23, 2025 - Online - Live Streaming - Half-Days

STATUS: Confirmed (Guaranteed to Run)
Organizer Notes

​This course will be run Live-online / Instructor-led over 4 x 4 hour afternoon sessions, Monday to Thursday.

Time: Tentatively from 1:30pm to 5:30pm GMT

All sessions need to be attended.

£1,440.00 | €1,740.00 excluding Vat

Enroll Now         Back to Course Schedule


Venue Details

Online - Live Streaming - Half-Days

There will be live interaction with instructor. Email academy@exida.com (for US) or landerson@exida.com (for UK) course times.


Please read our Cancellation and Reschedule Policy before signing up for any course.


Course Description:

The IEC 61508 family is a performance-based set of standards for functional safety that are commonly applied to the design and development of devices used in automatic protection systems for robotics, industrial / machinery equipment, energy, medical devices, railway, mining, etc. applications. 

This course provides an example new product development process for embedded system design which has proven to bring better products to market, at reduced cost, and with shorter time-to-market. This example process can meet 61508 requirements using electronics, microcomputers and mechanical components. Full Variability Language software requirements are described in a practical way.

To achieve market success and comply with 61508, smart electronic-mechanical devices must be designed to minimize systematic failures (design faults and documentation mistakes) and random failures of hardware/software based on probabilistic performance-based evaluation. The class describes how to accomplish this goal, traversing the development process from product conception to release for production. It covers the establishment of design goals, the use of functional safety (quality) management plans, evaluation of architecture design (DFMEA/DDMA), detailed design (FMEDA), derived safety requirements, integration / validation testing, safety manual documentation, and how to evaluate field failure data. FSE 211 stresses how to detect design deficiencies early in the process so that they can be corrected with minimal impact to cost and schedule. It also highlights how to document the results of the design process to make it easier to demonstrate 61508 compliance to a certification body.

Learning Objectives

  • Create a Functional Safety Management plan to manage project documentation, tasks, and deliverablesCreate / Review Product Safety Requirements to ensure traceability and flow-down to detailed design tasks
  • Evaluate / Interpret Risk Analysis to set product design goals
  • Create / Evaluate Safety Requirement Specification (SRS)
  • Select and Justify Engineering Tools for use in the Product Development process
  • Perform / Evaluate Design at all levels: system architecture, subsystem, hardware & software module 
  • Perform / Evaluate DFMEA / DDMA studies, Interpret Results, and Update Design 
  • Perform / Evaluate FMEDA studies, Interpret Results, Document 61508 reliability parameters 
  • Define effective Integration and Validation test plans, Create / execute detailed test procedures
  • Perform Fault injection testing to confirm functionality, performance, and diagnostics
  • Evaluate Field Failure data to estimate performance accurately 

Who Should Attend:

Staff from organizations that develop new products/devices for Functional Safety applications:

  • Functional Safety Managers
  • Approvals Coordinators
  • Product Designer / Developers
  • Safety Engineers
  • Reliability Engineers
  • Device Architect Designer
  • Embedded System Development Engineers

Length: 2 Days

The FSP Exam (Functional Safety Development):

The exida Functional Safety Practitioner (FSP) program is a certificate program that provides confirmation that an attendee shows competency by retaining the knowledge presented in this course. The FSP program also provides an analysis of where the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses lie, helping participants judge their competency level if interested in obtaining a certification like the CFSE or CFSP. The exam will be given at the conclusion of the training course, and is optional. Therefore if you wish not to participate, please let your instructor know. The candidate must achieve a minimum of 80% on the exam in order to receive their FSP certificate.