Developing a Configurable Fault Tolerant Multicore System for Optimized Sensor Processing

Abstract

The ambitious goals for implementing autonomous systems in nearly all industry sectors create big challenges for the designers of such devices. Especially sensors, key factors for enabling autonomy, must fulfil greatest demands. The challenge is to build highly reliable sensory systems, preferably based on commercial off-the-shelf components, with short design cycles, high robustness against faults and minimal power consumption. In this paper, we present an approach for designing such a sensory system that targets automated driving. Designed as a configurable software-implemented TMR system, we based it on three Tensilica Fusion G3 cores with negligible additional hardware to each core. We are able to show that this system can be controlled to support low power, fail safe, fail operational and distributed execution of different tasks, all while keeping the strict timing and safety constraints that are crucial in the automotive area.