Nowadays, FPGAs are sufficiently large to host not only single soft-core CPUs but a whole Multi-Processor System-on-a-Chip (MPSoC). They follow the recent trend of chip-multiprocessing. Given the requirement for domain segregation in safety and security related applications, we propose an FPGA-based architecture that achieves segregation by secure bus bridges. According to the SoC-paradigm, we use a single shared memory controller to reduce external component count. We pay special attention to performance evaluation and avoidance of temporal conflicts. The architecture is evaluated by dedicated bus observers using simulation and hardware prototypes and is finally benchmarked by running multiple isolated off-the-shelf Linux systems.

No abstract

Recent FPGA families exhibit a bandwidth gap that is inverse to the widely known memory bottleneck of hardwired platforms: Behaviorally described soft processors are comparatively slow whereas FPGAs offer high-throughput state-of-the-art memory attachments.We show that it is possible to take advantage of this bandwidth gap to host functionally partitioned safety-and security-critical software functions. Our proposed multisystem architecture instantiates multiple self-contained local systems on a reconfigurable platform that operates from a shared but partitioned memory. We benchmark and evaluate a novel asynchronous bus bridge and demonstrate that the asynchronous architecture is scalable both at run-time and during place-and-route.