Title :
Hardware/Software Design Considerations for Automotive Embedded Systems
Author :
Salewski, Falk ; Kowalewski, Stefan
Author_Institution :
Embedded Software Lab., RWTH Aachen Univ., Aachen
Abstract :
An increasing number of safety-critical functions is taken over by embedded systems in today´s automobiles. While standard microcontrollers are the dominant hardware platform in these systems, the decreasing costs of new devices as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) make it interesting to consider them for automotive applications. In this paper, a comparison of microcontrollers and FPGAs with respect to safety and reliability properties is presented. For this comparison, hardware fault handling was considered as well as software fault handling. Own empirical evaluations in the area of software fault handling identified advantages of FPGAs with respect to the encapsulation of real-time functions. On the other hand, several dependent failures were detected in versions developed independently on microcontrollers and FPGAs.
Keywords :
automotive engineering; embedded systems; field programmable gate arrays; hardware-software codesign; FPGA; automotive embedded systems; field programmable gate arrays; hardware fault handling; hardware-software design; safety-critical functions; software fault handling; Automobiles; Automotive applications; Automotive engineering; Costs; Embedded system; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Microcontrollers; Safety; Software design; Embedded systems; empirical evaluations; fault handling; safety-critical systems;
Journal_Title :
Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TII.2008.2002919