I decided that my first blog in the safety matters series for 2025 should look back at some of the highlights of industrial cybersecurity, functional safety, and intrinsic safety in 2024. The following are in no particular order.
One of the biggest events is the final publication of Europe's CRA (Cyber Resiliency Act). This act imposes minimum cybersecurity requirements on products to be sold in Europe. Given that many people want to sell the same products worldwide, this will impact developers outside of Europe. The full text of the CRA is available here. The CRA will come into full force in 2027.
Figure 1 CRA final text header
The essential requirements of CRA are given in Annex I of its text.
Figure 2 First few essential requirements of the CRA
For me, this is exciting as ADI now has a good range of secure authenticators to add cybersecurity according to IEC 62443 to new and existing industrial designs. Hopefully, in 2025, it will be confirmed that compliance with IEC 62443 will give a presumption of conformity with the CRA.
Another highlight of the year is that the two FDIS (final draft international standards) of the industrial robot safety standard parts 1(robot designers) and 2(robot users) have been approved. I was sure they would be published in 2024, but nothing in safety is simple, so now it will be 2025. These standards include lots of clarifications and new guidance, including requirements related to cyber security, communications, and the mandatory use of redundancy (CAT 3 or HFT=1) architectures.
Note—CAT 3, according to machine safety standard ISO 13849 or HFT=1, according to IEC 62061/IEC 61508, is no longer mandatory if the PFH (average probability of dangerous failure per hour) is sufficiently low. This should make it easier to adopt new technologies, including 3D TOF and AMR/GMR/TMR encoders.
Figure 3 - Snapshot from ISO website dated 17th Dec 2024
I have been a member of IEC TC 65/SC 65A/MT 61508-1/2 and MT 61508-3 since 2016. It is great that all parts of IEC 61508 have been submitted for CDV (Committee draft) for a vote. Hopefully, they will be published for national committee comments in the spring of 2025. This will include the latest draft of IEC 61508-2-1, which covers the functional safety of semiconductors. I lead this part, and while it started out as a TS (technical specification), it was upgraded to a full standard in autumn 2024.
Regarding intrinsic safety, I was appointed as an Irish expert for IEC 60079-47, but it was too late to make comments before the CD was submitted for IEC 60079-42.
Figure 4 2-WISE standard
I attended several Irish mirror committee meetings for the IEC 60079 series but no international meetings. I did, however, attend standards meetings in
I ran a parkrun while there. Be warned: the Nose Hill parkrun in Calgary is 12km outside the city center and uphill to the start. However, the run itself is flat. It was almost 30 degrees when I was there during the Summer, and I see on Facebook that it is now -20'C and they are still running. The parkrun in Edinburgh Holyrood is uphill for the first half, seriously uphill, and downhill for the second. At least one of the people there for the standards meeting ran it that day. Nuremberg was a very pleasant and flat run around a lake. This was my first year running a parkrun, so it was a personal highlight of the year, even if not directly related to my work topics.
Back to work stuff, another highlight was attending the international robot safety conference held in Cincinnati and presenting on "Functional safety and cyber security for robots." This is an excellent conference if you get an opportunity to attend and are interested in robot safety. I think next year's conference is in Houston.
Another personal highlight is the 12 blogs published in my safety matters series covering topics such as
I also posted weekly snippets from the standards, and you should expect to see more of each in 2025.
Looking ahead to 2025, the big excitement for me will be when we get the comments back on all 8 parts of the IEC 61508 series. We could get anywhere from 2500 to 5000 comments, which will take much work to sort and resolve. I'm sure there will also be CD and CDV of standards I didn't know were being updated, which is always interesting. These will update the state of the art, whether functional safety, cyber security, or intrinsic safety. I also look forward to increasing my intrinsic safety knowledge. It's great to work in a new area, and many of our customers who need functional safety also need intrinsic safety.
Check back next month on the second Tuesday for the next blog in this series. Until then, I hope to post "mini-blogs" on the other Tuesdays in the month directly from my LinkedIn account. Please follow me on LinkedIn if interested.
For previous blogs in this series, see here
For the full suite of ADI blogs on the EngineerZone platform, see here
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