Functional Safety

Why does Functional Safety become more and more important?

The tradition of functional safety dates back to the 1970s, when an uncontrolled reaction from overheating caused a major Dioxin leak at the Seveso chemical plant in the north of Italy. This event led to stricter industrial safety regulations that formed the basis for international standards. Functional safety has become a critically important issue across all areas from transportation, healthcare and medical devices to the design of energy plants or amusement parks and rides. As a result, manufacturer and operators place top priority on the quality and safety of products and plants in order to protect people, property and the environment against technology-related risk.

On the one hand the fast growing digitalisation and automation in all areas of life and industry enables reliable control of increasingly complex and networked processes and systems. On the other, this development gives rise to growing challenges and requirements for functional safety technology. Therefore companies should reduce all safety risks to an acceptable level, including hazards due to disruptions of complex systems. Disruptions of functional safety can result in massive accountability requests.

The specification of functional safety are regulated worldwide in the international standard IEC 61508 with sector specific derived standards as EN ISO 13849-1, IEC 62061, ISO 26262 or the series of standards EN 5012X. 

TÜV SÜD – Your expert for Functional Safety

With years of experience in functional safety, TÜV SÜD offers proven capabilities backed by international recognition. Our multidisciplinary team of experts understands the complex requirements in the field of functional safety and has the experience to support projects from chip design to the entire assessment of a plant. We offer TÜV SÜD certification marks that are globally recognised and synonymous with quality and safety.

Within the different legal entities about 300 employees worldwide deal with functional safety projects for application independent and application dependent (generic) programmable systems (PES) in different areas. With years of experience in functional safety, TÜV SÜD offers proven capabilities backed by international recognition.  Our experts also participate in the most important standardization committees.

With TÜV SÜD you gain a partner who offers more than just the usual product tests in the field of functional safety.