A Predictable Framework for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Safety-critical embedded systems, commonly found in automotive, space, and health-care, are highly reactive and concurrent. Their most important characteristics are that they require both functional and timing correctness. C has been the language of choice for programming such systems. However, C lacks many features that can make the design process of such systems seamless while also maintaining predictability. This paper addresses the need for a C-based design framework for achieving time predictability. To this end, we propose the PRET-C language and the ARPRET architecture. PRET-C offers a small set of extensions to a subset of C to facilitate effective concurrent programming. We present a new synchronous semantics for PRET-C. It guarantees that all PRET-C programs are deterministic, reactive, and provides thread-safe communication via shared memory access. This simplifies considerably the design of safety-critical systems. We also present the architecture of a precision timed machine (PRET) called ARPRET. It offers the ability to design time predictable architectures through simple customizations of soft-core processors. We have designed ARPRET particularly for efficient and predictable execution of PRET-C. We demonstrate through extensive benchmarking that PRET-C based system design excels in comparison to existing C-based paradigms. We also qualitatively compare our approach to the Berkeley-Columbia PRET approach. We have demonstrated that the proposed approach provides an ideal framework for designing and validating safety-critical embedded systems.