Hardware software codesign of a safety-critical embedded computer system for an automatic endoscope

Hardware-software codesign is presented for a safety-critical embedded computer system. The system is applied for endoscope control and navigation. The embedded system architecture provides high performance computing for real-time implementation of machine vision algorithms and fault-tolerance for patient safety. It consists of five processor cores, local memory, I/O interface and multi-port shared memory. The hardware and software system architectures are co-designed. A virtual hardware is developed to execute the application and system software tasks. The system is designed and modeled using VHDL and Eaglei toolset. We have limited system verification to co-verification of system hardware architecture and fault-tolerance strategies. Co-verification results indicate that the system performance degrades gracefully under various fault scenarios