Title
Soft core based embedded systems in critical aerospace applications
Abstract
There is an increasing interest in the aerospace industry to reduce the cost of the systems by means of using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) devices. The engineering of novel microsatellites and nanosatellites are clear examples of this new trend. However, the use of sub-micron technologies has led to greater sensitivity of these devices to radiation-induced transient faults, limiting the exploitation of this approach in critical systems. This paper presents an innovative application of soft-core microprocessor based embedded systems, to design dependable and reduced-cost critical systems with COTS reconfigurable devices (flash based FPGAs). To make this possible, it is necessary to fine-tune the protection strategy by combining selectively fault mitigation techniques based on hardware or software. In this way, the resultant system not only fulfills both the design constraints and the dependability requirements, but also avoids the cost provoked by excessive use of protection mechanisms. A case study is presented in which the design space exploration between hardware and software protection techniques permits to find the best trade-offs among performance, reliability, memory size and hardware cost in a dependable subsystem.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.sysarc.2011.04.006
Journal of Systems Architecture - Embedded Systems Design
Keywords
Field
DocType
cots reconfigurable device,soft-microprocessors,co-design,dependable subsystem,protection strategy,critical system,design space exploration,reliability,soft core,low-cost satellites,single event upset,hardware cost,critical aerospace application,design constraint,excessive use,soft-error mitigation,protection mechanism,software protection technique,fault tolerance,transient fault,embedded system,co design
Aerospace,Dependability,Computer science,Microprocessor,Parallel computing,Field-programmable gate array,Real-time computing,Software,Fault tolerance,Commercial off-the-shelf,Design space exploration,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
57
10
Journal of Systems Architecture
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.65
24
Authors
6