PaRTAA: A Real-time Multiprocessor for Mixed-Criticality Airborne Systems

Abstract

Mixed-criticality systems, where multiple systems with varying criticality-levels share a single hardware platform, require isolation between tasks with different criticality-levels. Isolation can be achieved with software-based solutions or can be enforced by a hardware level partitioning. An asymmetric multiprocessor architecture offers hardware-based isolation at the cost of underutilized hardware resources, and the inter-core communication mechanism is often a single point of failure in such architectures. In contrast, a partitioned uniprocessor offers efficient resource utilization at the cost of limited scalability. We propose a partitioned real-time asymmetric architecture (PaRTAA) specifically designed for mixed-criticality airborne systems, featuring robust partitioning within processing elements for establishing isolation between tasks with varying criticality. The granularity in the processing element offers efficient resource utilization where inter-dependent tasks share the same processing element for sequential execution while preserving isolation, and independent tasks simultaneously execute on different processing elements as per system requirements.