{\AE}r{\o}: A Platform Architecture for Mixed-Criticality Airborne Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware-based platform architecture for mixed-criticality airborne systems, using processor partitions and cycle-accurate scheduling to improve isolation, predictability, and reduce overhead in real-time embedded applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel hardware-level partitioning approach with a pipelined processor and cycle-accurate scheduling for mixed-criticality systems, demonstrated on FPGA for avionics.

Findings

Hardware partitioning improves isolation and predictability.

Cycle-accurate scheduling accommodates diverse application requirements.

Implementation on FPGA validates the approach in avionics use case.

Abstract

Real-time embedded platforms with resource constraints can take the benefits of mixed-criticality system where applications with different criticality-level share computational resources, with isolation in the temporal and spatial domain. A conventional software-based isolation mechanism adds additional overhead and requires certification with the highest level of criticality present in the system, which is often an expensive process. In this article, we present a different approach where the required isolation is established at the hardware-level by featuring partitions within the processor. A four-stage pipelined soft-processor with replicated resources in the data-path is introduced to establish isolation and avert interference between the partitions. A cycle-accurate scheduling mechanism is implemented in the hardware for hard-real-time partition scheduling that can accommodate different periodicity and execution time for each partition as per user needs, while preserving time-predictability at the individual application level. Applications running within a partition has no sense of the virtualization and can execute either on a host-software or directly on the hardware. The proposed architecture is implemented on FPGA thread and demonstrated with an avionics use case.