Unboxing the sand: on deploying safety measures in the programmable logic of COTS MPSoCs

The lack of sufficient hardware support for functional safety precludes the full adoption of many Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) MPSoCs in safety-related systems, such as those in the aerospace industry. Some recent MPSoCs come along with programmable logic (PL), primarily intended to offload some specific complex functions that can be much more efficiently implemented in hardware than in software, hence being such PL a kind-of-sandbox fully mastered by ASIC cores outside the PL. This paper proposes using PL in those COTS MPSoCs to deploy the support needed to implement safety measures efficiently to enable the use of those MPSoCs for systems needing high assurance levels. Hence, the goal is not mastering PL from the cores solely, but also allowing PL to provide monitoring (e.g. contention, diversity, watchdogs) and control (e.g. configuring QoS features) capabilities to enable the realization of a safety concept atop. The early work presented in this paper already provides specific monitoring, diversity, and controlling strategies to allow PL take over safety-related functionalities.This work is part of the project PCI2020-112010, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under project ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 877056. This work has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-107255GBC21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version