Altera FPGA in safety application

Hi thanks both of you for your answers,

--- Quote Start ---

Life support is a different category. For a safety application it's usually sufficient to detect an error reliably and shutdown the monitored system.

--- Quote End ---

Exactly.

--- Quote Start ---

In my opinion, a safety application involving FPGA can be analysed similar to other digital logic applications, e.g. processor based. However, failure probability of complex devices is still calculated based on the transistor count.

--- Quote End ---

Well the main difference between an FPGA and a processor based system we considered so far is the following:

In a processor, if the CPU itself has an hardware failure, nothing will work anymore (there is no parallelism in processor). Therefore we only need to check periodically that the program memory is still consistant and to monitor the processor with a watchdog to be sure the system is working. Well at least this is what we do normally and it is fine.

Now with an FPGA, the problem might well be that only parts of the device are broken. e.g. a simple logic element. The system would still work, give a result, but this result could be false and we would not detect it. I know it is highly hypotetical but from my understanding of FPGA it could actually happen, right? I just would have liked to be sure I understand it well.