Hi,
probably KiCad will be used in the future also for the design of safety critical
embedded products. For example in the automotive industry.
If an EDA software is compliant to certain standards, it will be better adopted
by the industry.
Are there some ongoing efforts within KiCad development, to do software development
process documentation, maybe in regards of a later ISO quality standard certification?
Robert
Kicad is a design tool. Are there even standards or certifications for design tools? I am completely out of the loop on these things but I always assumed that certifications were for end product, not design tools. Tools can help you achieve certification of your product but they are not regulated themselves usually.
Can you be more specific which
do you mean?
Safety critical software is very expensive to develop. Is there such a thing as certified EDA software package? How far do you go, KiCad uses C++ and Python and other third party tools. these are not approved
For use as a development tool for the automotive this makes as much sense as a safety design approved pencil.
I heared a story about the commercial aircraft industry, and all software and computers that were made to do all significant calculations have to be preserved throughout the lifetime of those aircraft, in case some structural problems pop up. They probably still have a warehouse full of PDP-8’s somewhere…
But I don’t see how that would be relevant to a PCB designed with KiCad. If a PCB designed with KiCad had any problem, then it would show in the Gerber files too.
But even if a company would want to go in that direction for some reason, then they are in luck with Open Source software such as KiCad. It is relatively simple to archive installation packages, or even the whole source code tree inclusive all build tools and external libraries. Just fetch them from gitlab, and archive what you want or need.
There is also no messin’ with installation keys, cloud based activation, hardware dongles or other artificial limitations.
I’d also think that spending effort on this from KiCad’s side (I’m not a KiCad representative, just personal opinion) would be premature. KiCad has plenty of grow potential already.
If you have special needs or wishes in this direction then I suggest you contact KiCad Services Corporation. They do commercial support for KiCad and are open to special wishes and custom development.
Not so much the computers, but you must be able to re-run or open any design/simulation/synthesis/compilation with the EXACT version that it was released (ideally stated in the DDP). If an issue happens with an LRU it needs to be determined whether it is a design oversight (and thus other systems using the same “common circuit” or “routine” might be susceptible) or whether it was a toolchain issue and thus what other products could have an issue.
Problem is a load of software stopped working for windows7 and now with windows10 so yes… Some old machine or VM is needed
A quality standard may not refer to a product but to a process and organization. And there it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that processes or organizations should work like this or that, but that everything is documented so that we can know what happens in each situation.
Getting and keeping an ISO certification costs pretty much. It must be renewed again and again.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.