ADS1015-Q1: Do our portfolios support functional safety

Hi Zirui,

in principle any of our ADCs can be used in a functional safety system design. It is up to the system developer to make sure the system meets the required metrics to achieve ASIL B. Multiple customers have actually used the ADS1015-Q1 successfully in functional safety designs up to ASIL B or higher already.
As the ADS1015-Q1 does not integrate any internal safety mechanisms the customer would have to add external circuitry to meet ASIL B metrics. Examples of those safety mechanisms would be:

• Supply voltage monitoring
• Reading conversion results multiple times to detect communication faults
• Reading back the user register settings after they have been written and after that periodically to detect bit errors.
• Applying an external test signal to one of the analog inputs to detect faults in the internal signal chain (PGA, ADC, etc.) or the multiplexer
• Monitoring the RDY pin with a window watchdog. This can detect faults in the internal oscillator if the conversion results are not available within a certain time window.
• Detecting loss of communication between the host and the ADC
• Etc.

As of today (September 2021) none of TI's precision ADCs have been developed according to the ISO 26262 standard. However we can/do provide some basic functional safety documentation, such as Functional Safety FIT rate, Failure Mode Distribution (FMD) and Pin FMAs, for our existing devices to aid customers in their functional safety system design. For those hardware elements which are not developed according to ISO 26262, the customer would have to evaluate the hardware element for its suitability in the functional safety system according to ISO 26262-8, Section 13.

Regards,
Joachim Wuerker