SoC-Level Safety-Oriented Design Process in Electronic System Level Development Environment

Abstract

We propose a safety-oriented design process for IP-based safety-critical system-on-chip (SoC). The proposed safety process can facilitate the measurement of the robustness based on the safety-related metrics and scales of failure-induced risks in a system that can be employed to locate the critical components for protection to effectively diminish the influence of failures on the system. The risk reduction phase is activated to enhance the robustness of critical components identified by vulnerability analysis if the measured robustness is insufficient. An SoC-level safety design platform was built on the SystemC Synopsys Platform Architect MCO to demonstrate the core idea of the safety process. The safety-oriented design process for an ARM-embedded SoC modeled at the TLM level was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of our safety approach.