“Having to balance the needs between transitioning from single-core to multi-core architectures while still maintaining industry-standard safety integrity levels is making it harder than ever to manage the software in today’s vehicles,” said Harm-André Verhoef, TASKING product manager at Altium. “This is why we introduced the TASKING Integrity Checker to help identify and remove safety critical interference within automotive applications in the most efficient way possible for embedded software developers.”
Automotive safety integrity levels guarantee safe and reliable execution of applications in the real-time environment of an automobile. Yet developers struggle with the need to partition their applications and reduce the interference between software components while maintaining the highest safety levels possible.
One way to achieve this goal in mixed criticality systems is to prove that low-level safety functions, like audio related applications, do not interfere with high-level safety functions, like braking systems. This ‘Freedom from Interference’ is the goal, but not an easy one to achieve in multi-core architectures where more functions are being combined into one control unit.
The TASKING Integrity Checker is said to provide embedded software developers with the needed tools to accomplish this task, including: The ability to work at the compiler level so developers do not have to change the source code in an application; Information about memory allocated, with unique ways to identify memory write/read access; and information about the safety classes of functions is built into the application, allowing developers to address the implementation of safety requirements with ASIL aware static analysis.
By making the TASKING Integrity Checker available as a stand-alone application, Altium says embedded developers will be able to create safe and reliable automotive applications, regardless of what architecture they are working on.