4 research outputs found
SRAM-Based FPGA Systems for Safety-Critical Applications: A Survey on Design Standards and Proposed Methodologies
As the ASIC design cost becomes affordable only for very large-scale productions, the FPGA technology is currently becoming the leading technology for those applications that require a small-scale production. FPGAs can be considered as a technology crossing between hardware and software. Only a small-number of standards for the design of safety-critical systems give guidelines and recommendations that take the peculiarities of the FPGA technology into consideration. The main contribution of this paper is an overview of the existing design standards that regulate the design and verification of FPGA-based systems in safety-critical application fields. Moreover, the paper proposes a survey of significant published research proposals and existing industrial guidelines about the topic, and collects and reports about some lessons learned from industrial and research projects involving the use of FPGA devices
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High integrity hardware-software codesign
Programmable logic devices (PLDs) are increasing in complexity and speed, and are being used as important components in safety-critical systems. Methods for developing high-integrity software for these systems are well-known, but this is not true for programmable logic. We propose a process for developing a system incorporating software and PLDs, suitable for safety critical systems of the highest levels of integrity. This process incorporates the use of Synchronous Receptive Process Theory as a semantic basis for specifying and proving properties of programs executing on PLDs, and extends the use of SPARK Ada from a programming language for safety-critical systems software to cover the interface between software and programmable logic. We have validated this approach through the specification and development of a substantial safety-critical system incorporating both software and programmable logic components, and the development of tools to support this work. This enables us to claim that the methods demonstrated are not only feasible but also scale up to realistic system sizes, allowing development of such safety-critical software-hardware systems to the levels required by current system safety standards
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FPGAs in Critical Hardware/Software Systems
FPGAs are being used in increasingly more complex roles in critical systems, interacting with conventional critical software. Established safety standards require rigorous justification of safety and correctness of the conventional software in such systems. Newer standards now make similar requirements for safety-related electronic hardware, such as FPGAs, in these systems. In this paper we examine the current state-of-the-art in programming FP-GAs, and their use in conventional (low-criticality) hardware/software systems. We discuss the impact that the safety standards requirements have on the co-development of hardware/software combinations. and suggest adaptations of existing best practice in software development that could discharge them. We pay particular attention to the development and analysis of high-level language programs for FPGAs designed to interact with conventional software