Mapping Time-Critical Safety-Critical Cyber Physical Systems to Hybrid FPGAs

Abstract

Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs), such as those found in modern vehicles, include a number of important time and safety-critical functions. Traditionally, applications are mapped to several dedicated electronic control units (ECUs), and hence, as new functions are added, compute weight and cost increase considerably.%ECU consolidation, where multiple functions are combined on fewer ECUs is an important area, but traditional software ECUs fail to offer the required performance, parallelism, and isolation to support this. With increasing computational and communication demands, traditional software ECUs fail to offer the required performance to provide determinism and predictability, while multi-core approaches fail to provide sufficient isolation between tasks. Hybrid FPGAs, combining a processor and reconfigurable fabric on a single die, allow for parallel hardware implementation of complex sensor processing tightly coupled with the flexibility of software on a processor. We demonstrate the advantages of such architectures in consolidating distributed processing with predictability, determinism and isolation, enabling ECU consolidation and bandwidth reduction.