Accellera Approves Functional Safety Language Standard 1.0 for Release
ELK GROVE, Calif., Oct. 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera) today announced that its Board of Directors has approved the Functional Safety Language (FSL) Standard 1.0 for release. The new standard provides a unified, interoperable and automation-friendly language and data model for representing, exchanging and integrating functional safety information across the electronic systems development lifecycle. The FSL 1.0 standard is available for immediate download.
“Functional safety is becoming increasingly important as electronic systems grow in complexity and are deployed in a wider range of safety-critical applications,” said Lu Dai, Chair of Accellera. “Accellera’s mission is to bring the industry together to develop standards that improve interoperability and enable greater efficiency and innovation. FSL 1.0 is a strong example of that mission in action, providing a common way to represent and exchange functional safety information while laying the foundation for greater automation, collaboration, and scalability across the development ecosystem.”
As semiconductor devices play an increasingly important role in automotive, industrial, aerospace, medical and other safety-critical applications, the amount and complexity of functional safety information that must be created, exchanged and maintained continues to grow.
While established functional safety standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 define requirements for the development of safety-critical systems, they do not prescribe how functional safety data should be represented or exchanged among engineering tools, teams and organizations. As a result, safety information is often maintained in spreadsheets, proprietary databases and tool-specific formats, creating challenges for automation, interoperability and traceability.
“FSL 1.0 provides a new approach for how functional safety information is captured and exchanged throughout the development lifecycle,” said Alessandra Nardi, Chair of Accellera’s Functional Safety Working Group. “As electronic and integrated products move through the supply chain, FSL provides a common language that allows safety analysis information to be created, reused, integrated and traced with increased confidence from one level of design to the next. This creates new opportunities to automate functional safety workflows and more closely connect safety analysis with design and verification. This is a significant step forward, and I would like to thank the members of the Functional Safety Working Group for their tremendous effort in making this standard a reality.”
FSL 1.0 provides a standardized language for creating and exchanging FMEDA data across the supply chain. It captures failure modes, failure-mode effects, safety mechanisms, technology information and safety requirements, and provides standardized mappings between that safety information and design representations. FSL also supports hierarchical FMEDAs, allowing safety analyses developed for products and components to be integrated into subsystem- and system-level analyses, providing traceability and reducing the need to recreate or manually translate safety information as designs move through the supply chain.
The standard supports both assumption-based and design-mapped FMEDA methodologies, enabling safety analysis to begin early and refine as the design implementation progresses. It is also feasible to combine or refine an estimated diagnostic coverage with the one measured from verification and fault-injection activities, bridging the gap between verification results and safety analysis. Furthermore, FSL supports calculation and reporting of safety-related failure rates and metrics for ISO 26262 and IEC 61508. FSL 1.0 is a domain-specific language based on the TCL syntax, enabling machine processing and integration into automated EDA and functional safety workflows, reducing duplication of effort and improving consistency across tools. FSL is designed to complement and be consistent with existing functional safety standards, including ISO 26262 and IEC 61508, by providing a consistent way to capture and exchange the data needed to support their application without redefining or altering their requirements.
For more information about FSL 1.0 and the work of the Functional Safety Working Group, visit the Accellera Functional Safety Working Group page.
For a list of supporting quotes from member companies, visit the Accellera website.
About Accellera
Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. Find out more about membership. Follow @accellera on X and LinkedIn or to comment, please use #accellera. Accellera Global Sponsors are: Cadence, ChipAgents, Siemens, and Synopsys.
Accellera and Accellera Systems Initiative are trademarks of Accellera Systems Initiative Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.
For more information, contact:
Barbara Benjamin
Marketing Communications for Accellera Systems Initiative
Phone: +1 503 209 2323
Email: barbara@hipcom.com
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