On-chip Watchdog to monitor RTOS activity in MPSoC exposed to noisy environment

Abstract

The use of Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) became a mandatory condition to design safety-critical real-time embedded systems based on multicore processors. At the same time, these systems are becoming more and more sensitive to transient faults originated from a large spectrum of noisy sources such as conducted and radiated Electromagnetic Interference (EMI). Therefore, the system's reliability degrades. In this work, we present a hardware-based infrastructure intellectual property (I-IP) core able to monitor the RTOS' activity in a multicore processor system-on-chip (MPSoC). The final goal is to detect faults that corrupt the task scheduling process in embedded systems based on preemptive RTOS. The I-IP core, namely RTOS-Watchdog (RTOS-WD), was described in VHDL and is connected to the address busses between the cores and their local iCache memories. A case-study based on a MPSoC running different test programs under the control of a typical preemptive RTOS was implemented and exposed to conducted EMI. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides higher fault coverage when compared to the native fault detection mechanisms embedded in the kernel of the RTOS.