Special Session: AutoSoC - A Suite of Open-Source Automotive SoC Benchmarks

The current demands for autonomous driving generated momentum for an increase in research in the different technologies required for these applications. Nonetheless, the limited access to representative designs and industrial methodologies poses a challenge to the research community. Considering this scenario, there is a high demand for an open-source solution that could support development of research targeting automotive applications. This paper presents the current status of AutoSoC, an automotive SoC benchmark suite that includes hardware and software elements and is entirely open-source. The objective is to provide researchers with an industrial-grade automotive SoC that includes all essential components, is fully customizable, and enables analysis of functional safety solutions and automotive SoC configurations. This paper describes the available configurations of the benchmark including an initial assessment for ASIL B to D configurations

Lock-V: a heterogeneous fault tolerance architecture based on Arm and RISC-V

This article presents Lock-V, a heterogeneous fault tolerance architecture that explores a dual-core lockstep (DCLS) technique to mitigate single event upset (SEU) and common-mode failure (CMF) problems. The Lock-V was deployed in two versions, Lock-VA and Lock-VM by applying design diversity in two processor architectures at the instruction set architecture (ISA)-level. Lock-VA features an Arm Cortex-A9 with a RISC-V RV64GC, while Lock-VM includes an Arm Cortex-M3 along with a RISC-V RV32IMA processor. The solution explores fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) technology to deploy softcore versions of the RISC-V processors, and dedicated accelerators for performing error detection and triggering the software rollback system used for error recovery. To test Lock-V in both versions, a fault-injection mechanism was implemented to cause bit-flips in the processor registers, a common problem usually present in heavy radiation environments.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020