The ACROSS MPSoC - A new generation of multi-core processors designed for safety-critical embedded systems
The European ARTEMIS ACROSS project aims to overcome the limitations of existing Multi-Processor Systems-on-a-Chip (MPSoC) architectures with respect to safety-critical applications. MPSoCs have a tremendous potential in the domain of embedded systems considering their enormous computational capacity and energy efficiency. However, the currently existing MPSoC architectures have significant limitations with respect to safety-critical applications. These limitations include difficulties in the certification process due to the high complexity of MPSoCs, the lacking temporal determinism and problems related to error propagation between subsystems. These limitations become even more severe, when subsystems of different criticality levels have to be integrated on the same computational platform. Examples of such mixed-criticality integration are found in the avionics and automotive industry with their desire to integrate safety-critical, mission critical and non-critical subsystems on the same platform in order to minimize size, weight, power and cost. The main objective of ACROSS is to develop a new generation of multi-core processors designed specially for safety-critical embedded systems; the ACROSS MPSoC. In this paper we will show how the ACROSS MPSoC overcomes the limitations of existing MPSoC architectures in order to make the multi-core technology available to the safety-critical domain. The proposed approach enables efficient certification, complexity management, mixed-criticality integration and the development of temporally deterministic hard real-time systems. The major technological innovations of ACROSS are an increased level of design abstraction, message-based interfaces for core-to-core communication and reliable fault and error containment established by a novel time-triggered network-on-chip. The achieved results comprise, a novel architecture for MPSoCs, a prototype implemenaton on FPGA technology as a proof-of-concept, a comprehensive set of middle-ware services and multiple demonstrators that show the benefits of the ACROSS Architecture in real world industrial applications. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
multicore hard real time systems fault tolerant systems mixed-criticality systems composability fault containment temporal isolation segregation