Towards Certifiable Multicore-based Platforms for Avionics

Work in Progress Session, 21st IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Techonology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2015). 13 to 16, Apr, 2015, pp 27-28. Seattle, U.S.A..The demand for extra functionality in modern applications is a never ending trend. The hardware vendors are actively improving the design of processors to accommodate these complex applications. The increase in clock speed to enhance the performance of the processor has hit its limits. This is driven by the fact that the performance per watt became costly at high frequencies. Hence, Moore’s law is no longer sustained with increasing frequencies but with additional cores [1]. Therefore, in the last decade, the semiconductor industry has experienced a paradigm shift from single processor design to multicore processors (MCP). Cores in MCP share many resources like caches, main memory, I/O devices and interconnects. This sharing, which does not exist in single core processors, makes the temporal behavior of MCPs rather complex and highly unpredictable as these platforms are designed to improve the average-case performance. Consequently, their use in safetycritical applications such as avionics domain is extremely challenging. The certification authorities are very skeptical in the use of MCP platforms in avionics application