The Forum’s chair looks back on a successful 2018, with plans to expand in the new year ahead

The Khronos^® Safety Critical Advisory Forum (KSCAF) gathers safety critical experts from a wide range of disciplines, such as transportation and medical imaging, who have experience developing software and products to widely adopting standards. The goal of KSCAF is to develop guidelines and recommendations for engineers creating open standard APIs within Khronos, and elsewhere in the industry, so that those standards can help streamline the product safety certification process. By discussing and educating about safety standards and processes that may be applied to products using open standard APIs and their related tools, KSCAF has become a key industry forum for sharing expertise, and evolving effective practices around developing open standards for a widening range of industries where safety is paramount.

2018 was a busy and exciting year for the KSCAF, especially with its growing membership. As the Forum heads into the new year, it continues to attract interest from multiple domains, particularly automotive and avionics industries. Word must be getting out!

“We have seen significant growth and interest in the forum over the past nine months, and now we have sixteen companies regularly participating,” says Illya Rudkin, chair of the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum.” To the forum members, I would like to say thank you for donating your time, you are adding tremendous value to the industry by generating awareness of the need for safety critical APIs to assist in effective safety critical product certification.”

Where KSCAF was in 2018

Over the last year, the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum has presented at a number of automotive events, where members promoted both the Forum and Khronos with talks such as, “Open standards are important for diversity and are expanding to provide solutions in the safety critical domains,” and “Why participate, what is in it for us?”.

The Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum also published two blogs in 2018: Experts Wanted: Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum and Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum: Details and Why You Should Join.

KSCAF looking forward to 2019

As it enters 2019, the Forum looks to continue its presence at industry organizations, such as the Automotive Electronics Systems Innovation Network (AESIN) and the MISRA^®C++ working group, to help ensure new Khronos API specifications are compatible with safety critical standards and emerging ISO C++ developments.

“KSCAF will continue to look for opportunities to promote Khronos and its safety critical work and create awareness about the importance of safety critical APIs for many of today’s emerging industries,” says Rudkin. “Of course, the Forum will also continue to actively encourage and welcome new Forum members, both from within Khronos and the wider industry.”

Within Khronos, KSCAF has worked closely with several working groups that are expanding their specifications to cover safety critical graphics, compute, inferencing and vision processing. 2019 promises to be an even busier year for the Forum, as, in addition to its work in avionics and automotive industries, the forum begins to work with experts and groups from other markets where safety critical design is essential.

Stay tuned for updates on these and many more activities from the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum in 2019. For more information about the KSCAF, and to request to join at no cost, visit the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum landing page.

Illya works for Codeplay Software as a Principal Engineer since 2013 overseeing the development of tools chains for automotive semiconductor customers. He is the chair of the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum and also a member of the MISRAC++ committee.