Airborne Electronic Hardware Design Assurance: A Practitioner's Guide to RTCA/DO-254

Just finished a detailed read of this new textbook on DO-254. This is the first comprehensive look at this standard provided by practitioners responsible for assessing Do-254 compliance. The book helps fill a void created by differing regulatory interpretations and widely disparate opinions on how and when DO-254 should be applied. The book offers a fairly straight-forward treatment of the complete contents of DO-254. The strongest chapters are those devoted to hardware requirements analysis/capture and something the authors have dubbed "Design Assurance Through Design Practice." These chapters drive home the point that design assurance is much more than simply completing certain process-driven documentation. Rather, the proper application of design assurance requires a strong foundation of solid requirements implemented and verified via a mindset of bulletproofing your design and going the extra mile to anticipate possible faults in your logic. Detailed examples focused on ways shift registers can misbehave due to clock skew or synthesis tools can modify your logic design thus creating problems in unexpected places are especially beneficial to the reader. There are opportunities for improvement in the second edition including more discussion of where it may be possible to reduce effort for lower design assurance levels, more background on safety concerns associated with specific technologies (e.g., SRAM, COTS IP), creation and use of appropriate HDL standards, and how to ensure successful SOI audits of your DO-254 processes. A second edition could also easily add additional material of other potential error sources and how they should be addressed/mitigated within the DO-254 context. Finally, a treatment of additional verification techniques including Assertion-Based Verification (ABV) and Constrained Random Testing (CRT) and their use in satisfying DO-254 objectives would be helpful. Even without this material, this book is a significant contribution toward helping practitioners use and comply with DO-254.

This is, by far, the best book ever written on DO-254 specifically in regards to the philosophy of requirements and what it means to have a correct requirement. The future of verification is in this book - the industry as a whole will go over to DO-254 type requirements based verification as designs become more and more complex. I believe people will look back on this book in 10-15 years as similar to the 'Gang of Four' Design Patterns book that has designed software for the past twenty years.This book is very much a cognizant, detailed and thoughtful effort - while the main topics of the book can be used as a casual reader for managers, as a DO-254 verification low level contractor I cannot express enough gratitude regarding the detail - it has answered many questions that cannot be answered by an RTCA specification or DO-254.com planning charts.

I have been hoping someone would write a practical guide to RTCA/DO-254. It is here in this book. Written by two professionals that have lived it for many years. There is sufficient background on the RTCA guidance document for the novice to understand the intent and for the long suffering to explore the aha! moments of understanding. I thoroughly enjoyed these moments of insight myself as I read and reread the text. There is an excellent chapter on requirements which gives insight into a method of approach that makes the requirements-based verification of the end item almost a no-brainer! This chapter alone is worth the investment for those involved in requirements-based design and verification. It is about time. Thanks a million!!!

This book has provided me many insights to the practical side of working with DO-254, but one of my biggest frustrations, especially given the high cost of the book, is the fact that the table of contents in the Kindle edition does not link to the associated page. Pease fix this so I can give this book the review & rating it really deserves.

When is comes to requirements writing concepts, this is a book that can apply not just to DO-254 but to DO-178B/C and ARP-4754A also.

This book is a terrific resource and a clear, stepwise treatment of how to design DO-254 hardware correctly the first time.So very many of the clients I've come across are convinced that the planning (what's called "SOI-1" in DO-254), design (SOI-2), and verification (SOI-3) tasks for DO-254 are merely Annoying Documents and not useful for anything other than to check-off a box for the FAA.The author has produced a blueprint for doing all of this correctly, and backed it up with reasoning -- that planning has to come before design, that writing requirements before ANY VHDL or Verilog allows you to prove that you did it right, that the reqs have to be well-thought-out (not vague) and testable, and that writing the requirements with verification (not design or implementation) first in mind saves MASSIVE amounts of time later when the designer has to prove conclusively that "what you designed is also what you verified, and they are both what you wanted in the first place."Highly recommended.Daniel Conaway -- X-Tek Corporation

Randall has been our DER in a couple of projects, and I've attended some of his seminars. The book is based on that content, but expanded to the point that you can actually take the material and revamp the processes in your own company. The choice to include the same figures in both black-and-white and in color is unusual, but I think it helps in being able to look at the picture with the text in order to understand the concepts, then looking at the color plate and understanding the groupings of concepts. Roy's explanations of actual design practices for safety are spot on. Of course, there are many aspects to the certification processes that a book can't cover, so there are a few spots where the text makes you feel that more could have been said (HCIs, for example), but there is just so much good information included that I think it deserves the full five stars.

This is a must have text book for anyone involved in the design of electronic hardware for aircraft. It provides really clear steps from start to finish, no waffling like some other books.

Gutes Buch was den Aufwand zeigt was alles notwendig ist um programmierbare HW-Bausteine für den Luftfahrtbereich zuzulassen. Die Kompetenz von einem der beiden Autoren in diesem Bereich kann ich bestätigen, da ich mit ihm bereits beruflich zu tun hatte.

Je me suis acheté ce livre pour mon boulot. Il est vraiment bien détaillé explique tous les processus à suivre et à mettre en œuvre de façon détaillée. Tous les détails qui ne sont pas dans la do254 sont prises en main dans ce livre. Je ne peux que vous le conseiller