The Effect of Hardware Platform Selection on Safety-Critical Software in Embedded Systems: Empirical Evaluations

Industrial embedded systems based on different types of hardware platforms are increasingly used in safety-critical applications these days. These different hardware platforms lead to fundamental differences in design, especially in case of the corresponding software. Experiments have been conducted at our institute in which a single task has been implemented on microcontrollers and on programmable logic devices as well in order to investigate impacts of these hardware platforms on the software reliability. In this paper we present results based on an experiment comparing the potentials of encapsulation and verification of real-time behavior by review in FPGAs and microcontrollers.