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Application-Specific Tailoring of Multi-Core SoCs for Real-Time Systems with Diverse Predictability Demands

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Abstract

Embedded multi-core processors improve performance significantly and are desirable in many application-fields. This development, in particular, includes safety-critical real-time systems, which typically require a deterministic temporal behavior. However, even tasks without dependencies running on different cores can interfere due to, sometimes hidden, shared hardware resources, such as memory or communication buses. Consequently, only a pessimistic assumption of the worst-case execution time (WCET) that incorporates interference can be given. The desired performance gain therefore evaporates in the poor temporal analyzability. Safety-critical real-time systems are typically composed of multiple tasks with varying criticality levels and requirements on predictability and performance, respectively. In this paper, we present an approach that generates an application-specific, deterministic multi-core architecture for such mix-critical systems, thus eliminating the aforementioned hardware-induced interferences in the first place. Safety-critical tasks with stringent temporal requirements are mapped to dedicated Deterministic Execution Units (DEUs) while the remaining soft real-time tasks co-reside on a general purpose multi-core processor that offers performance over determinism. Just as well, predictable interconnections between DEUs are generated to satisfy dependencies and precedence constraints. Consequently, timing analysis for hard real-time tasks is significantly simplified, since interferences caused by shared resources and scheduling are finally eliminated. To show the benefits of our approach, an application-specific architecture for a flight controller was generated and compared to an ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core as a reference. Overall, we were able to significantly improve temporal properties of safety-critical tasks while preserving the overall performance for soft real-time tasks.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grants no. SCHR 603/9-2, the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre “Invasive Computing” (SFB/TR89, Project C1), the Bavarian Ministry of State for Economics under grant no. 0704/883 25 (EU EFRE funds) and by the Bavarian Research Foundation (BFS) as part of their research project “FORMUS3 IC”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Computer Science 3 - Computer Architecture, Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, Martensstr. 3, 91058, Erlangen, Germany

    Steffen Vaas, Marc Reichenbach & Dietmar Fey

  2. Chair of Computer Science 4 - Distributed Systems and Operating Systems, Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, Martensstr. 1, 91058, Erlangen, Germany

    Peter Ulbrich

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  1. Steffen Vaas
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  2. Peter Ulbrich
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Correspondence to Steffen Vaas.

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Vaas, S., Ulbrich, P., Reichenbach, M. et al. Application-Specific Tailoring of Multi-Core SoCs for Real-Time Systems with Diverse Predictability Demands. J Sign Process Syst 91, 773–786 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-018-1389-0

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