On the 26th of July 2016, The Khronos Group (Khronos, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies of which Codeplay is a member) announced that it has formed the Safety Critical Advisory Panel (SCAP). SCAP has been formed in recognition that there is continuing growing demand for graphics, artificial intelligence, data processing and computer vision open standards to be used in Safety Critical (SC) systems. These systems can range from automation and robotics to aviation, railways and leading on to totally autonomous vehicles in the near future. Within these systems, the types and numbers of cameras or sensors being added to compute and understand the environment that they are to operate in are growing, which in turn is generating ever larger amounts of data, all of which needs to be processed in a timely manner to make safe and correct decisions. The automotive manufacturing sector is driving this growth to provide Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to its customers, while automotive OEMs try to differentiate themselves from each other and be ahead of the curve when anticipating pending new vehicle legislation or new vehicle safety ratings. With SCAP, Khronos is aiming to bring open standards for machine vision, as well as graphics, to safety critical applications like ADAS. Codeplay is a supporter of open standards and provides its own implementations of the OpenCL and SYCL standard APIs with plans to provide SC versions in the near future.

SC systems are already applied to many existing domains such as medical, automotive, aviation, nuclear or railways. Like Codeplay, many of the members are being asked by their customers, or are driving their own portfolio, to implement solutions using open standards on SC systems in such domains. Codeplay sits on the SCAP to assist in the creation of the principles and guidelines for its members so that Khronos can provide more of its open standards in an SC-ready form.

Khronos also recognises that there are numerous SC domain experts who are not Khronos members but have the working knowledge of applying their domains’ particular safety development standards to software development in the real world. So Khronos has also opened up the SCAP to allow external experts to contribute to or critic the SC guidelines and principles in order to allow its open standards to become suitable for multiple domains.

The Khronos press release can be found here: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/advisory-panel-to-create-design-guidelines-for-safety-critical-apis.