Evolve Your DFMEA Process: Embrace DDMA for Integrated Functional Safety

SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONSDesign Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) has been shown to be a very effective design verification method over many decades. It has been used for design verification at various design levels. As an accredited Certification Body, we strongly recommend DFMEA.But not all new product developments include a DFMEA task. Reasons vary but many engineering managers believe the engineering hours consumed do not provide enough return on the hours invested. In functional safety projects, design verification tasks like DFMEA are required. Yet the effort is still sometimes judged to be too much, and alternative design verification methods are desired.Functional safety projects are typically embedded products such as a sensor, embedded controller, motor controller, etc. These products are used by system designers to build automatic protection systems.After significant experience with functional safety product development certification projects, a derivative of DFMEA called Design Deviation and Mitigation Analysis (DDMA) has been tested using a DDMA tool on several functional safety projects with good success. Some aspects of DFMEA have been substituted with needed functional safety information. Additional details have been added to gather and organize the information needed to support functional safety quantitative analysis.