Accellera Systems Initiative has approved Functional Safety Language (FSL) Standard 1.0 for release. The new standard provides a common way to capture, exchange and reuse functional safety data throughout electronic systems development.
Announced on 21 October 2026, the release addresses a key challenge in safety-critical engineering. Engineering teams need to keep safety information consistent and traceable across design tools, organisations and supply chains.
Why Functional Safety Data Interoperability Matters
Semiconductor devices play an increasingly important role in safety-critical applications. These include automotive, industrial, aerospace and medical systems. As these systems grow more complex, engineers must also manage more functional safety data.
Standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 define functional safety requirements. However, they do not specify a common format for exchanging safety data between engineering tools and organisations.
As a result, teams often store safety information in spreadsheets, proprietary databases or tool-specific formats. This makes it harder to automate processes, reuse data and maintain traceability as components move from individual devices to larger subsystems and complete systems.
FSL 1.0 aims to address this gap. It introduces a common language and data model for functional safety information.
What Does FSL 1.0 Introduce?
Accellera’s Functional Safety Working Group developed FSL 1.0 to standardise the creation and exchange of Failure Modes, Effects and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) data across the semiconductor supply chain.
The standard covers several areas of functional safety analysis, including:
- Failure modes and their effects
- Safety mechanisms and technology information
- Safety requirements and links to design representations
- Hierarchical FMEDA data, which allows teams to integrate component-level analyses into subsystem- and system-level assessments
Importantly, this hierarchical approach allows teams to build on existing safety analyses. They can reuse information across different levels of a design instead of recreating or manually translating it at each stage. This also helps maintain traceability throughout development.
FSL supports both assumption-based and design-mapped FMEDA methods. Therefore, engineers can begin safety analysis early and refine it as the design takes shape.
What Happens Next?
The approval of FSL 1.0 establishes a common foundation for exchanging functional safety information across engineering tools, teams and supply chains. However, its practical impact will depend on adoption and support across the wider EDA ecosystem.
For semiconductor teams working on safety-critical designs, the standard is worth following. In particular, it addresses challenges around traceability, reusable safety analysis and the relationship between design verification and functional safety.
The FSL 1.0 standard is available through Accellera’s official website.
Read the announcement: Accellera approves Functional Safety Language Standard 1.0
Download the standard: Accellera Functional Safety Language downloads