About Optima

Company Highlights

Optima Design Automation represents the next generation in automotive safety verification. The company has pioneered a new fault analysis technology for accelerated semiconductor development that enables a 1,000X performance improvement over traditional fault simulation. This platform powers the Optima Safety Platform that targets Hard and Soft Error analysis, essential in certifying the safe operation of automotive semiconductor devices to the ISO 26262 safety standard.

Located in Nazareth, Israel, the company is a recipient of a significant EU Horizon grant and has used this to assemble a world-class team of automotive safety and advanced simulation experts. Optima is now working with multiple leading automotive semiconductor providers to accelerate their automotive safety analysis processes, allowing for a significant increase in quality while reducing engineering schedules.

Automotive Semiconductor Safety Standards

Automotive electronic sophistication has increased dramatically. A vehicle in 2018 typically contained 100-300 microcontrollers or processors, 50+ complex electronic control units, and between 5 and 20 million lines of software code. The next generation of autonomous vehicles will leverage advanced computer-based artificial intelligence.

These electronic devices must be considered “safe” to a specified tolerable risk level. This is defined by the ISO 26262 safety standard. Analysis must be performed to prove that the device is tolerant to naturally occurring operational faults, requiring months of resource-intense effort. In this highly competitive environment, maximizing safety while also accelerating time to market is a critical engineering goal.

Core Technology for Accelerating Automotive Development

The primary analysis method for ISO 26262 random fault risk analysis is fault simulation. Traditional fault simulation is inherently slow, elongating development by many months, often with unsatisfactory results. Optima has pioneered a new style of Fault Injection Engine (FIE™) technology that exhibits significant performance improvements on real design benchmarks, typically greater than 1,000X over traditional fault simulation. This produces a dramatic improvement in development schedules and allows for increased analysis to prove device risk tolerance and ultimately improve device quality.

Apps for High-Quality ISO 26262 Analysis

The Optima Safety Platform contains a set of solutions, or “apps,” built on top of their FIE platform that automates key ISO 26262 analysis requirements. These include Optima-HE™ for Hard Error analysis and coverage maximization, Optima-SE™ for Soft Error analysis minimizing final device power consumption and Optima-SA™ for automated Static Analysis.

Leveraging Optima’s Apps and Technology Platform, automotive semiconductor providers, as well as electronic companies in other safety sensitive industries, can significantly accelerate development schedules, simplify their ability to meet ISO 26262 maximum risk tolerances, and increase the performance and quality of their products.

Distribution and Customer Support

Optima markets and sells its solutions to electronic semiconductor and systems companies worldwide. The company provides a variety of customer support and service options, including on-site training and consulting, through its international network of customer engineers.

Optima maintains a number of key partnerships to provide a range of options to their customers. The company works with service and EDA partners, such as ANSYS and Mentor, a Siemens Company, to enable complete verification solutions.

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