This seven part safety standard, was released from 1999 to 2001, making appearances under names such as AS 61508, DIN EN 61508, IEC 61508 and NZS 61508.

A thorough and comprehensive standard, it provides great detail on a wide range of safety management, safety engineering and engineering topics, including:

• a full life cycle for system, E/E/PES and software;
• developing sufficient safety requirements;
• deriving Safety Integrity Levels (SIL) via risk-based approach;
• setting numerical targets for safety-related systems; and
• techniques and measures to achieve those numerical targets.

Parts 2 and 3 of this safety standard, the sections detailing the techniques and measures to achieve the numerical targets for hardware and software respectively, have a similar role to Def Stan 00-54 Requirements for Safety Related Electronic Hardware in Defence Equipment and Def Stan 00-55 Requirements for Safety Related Software in Defence Equipment.

This standard has been applied across a large number of domains, but to ensure that the generic framework is able to be applied efficiently, sector specific standards relating to all of part of 61508 have been produced, e.g.:

• IEC 62061 "Safety of machinery – Functional safety of safety-related electrical, electronic and programmable electronic control systems"
• IEC 61511 "Functional safety: Safety Instrumented Systems for the process industry sector"
• IEC 61513 "Nuclear power plants – Instrumentation and control for systems important to safety – General requirements for systems"
• IEC 60880 "Nuclear power plants – Instrumentation and control systems important to safety – Software aspects for computer-based systems performing category A functions"
• IEC 62138 "Nuclear power plants – Instrumentation and control important to safety – Software aspects for computer-based systems performing category B or C functions"