Fault Handling in FPGAs and Microcontrollers in Safety-Critical Embedded Applications: A Comparative Survey

Safety-critical nowadays include more and more embedded computer systems, based on different hardware platforms. These hardware platforms, reaching from microcontrollers to programmable logic devices, lead to fundamental differences in design. Major differences result from different hardware architectures and their robustness and reliability as well as from differences in the corresponding software design. This paper gives an overview on how these hardware platforms differ with respect to fault handling possibilities as fault avoidance and fault tolerance and the resulting influence on the safety of the overall system.