The Khronos Group today announced the formation of a Safety Critical Advisory Panel to create guidelines for the design of safety critical graphics, compute and vision processing APIs. The Safety Critical Advisory Panel will be open to both Khronos members and invited experts from the industry. Markets such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles, robotics and avionics increasingly need advanced acceleration APIs that are designed to provide reliable operation and enable system safety certification. The guidelines will be openly published and adopted as part of Khronos’ proven API design process. Experienced practitioners in the field of safety critical system design are invited to apply for Advisory Panel membership, at no cost, with more details at the Khronos Safety Critical working group page.

The Khronos Group announces the immediate availability of the OpenGL SC 2.0 specification for bringing programmable graphics to systems that require system safety certification. The OpenGL SC 2.0 API specification has been developed by the Khronos Safety Critical working group to address the unique and stringent requirements of high reliability display system markets, including FAA DO-178C and EASA ED-12C Level A for avionics, and ISO 26262 safety standards for automotive. Building on the large number of worldwide customer deployments and successful avionics certifications using OpenGL SC 1.0, OpenGL SC 2.0 enables high reliability system manufacturers to take advantage of modern graphics programmable shader engines while still achieving the highest levels of safety certification. The Official OpenGL SC 2.0 feedback forum is online.

Khronos Safety Critical Working Group Chair Erik Noreke recently spoke at the 4th annual Scandinavian Conference on System and Software Safety (SCSSS). The slides from the presentation are now online.