›› 2015, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (2): 373-390.doi: 10.1007/s11390-015-1530-5

Special Issue: Surveys; Computer Architecture and Systems; Computer Graphics and Multimedia

• Computer Architecture and Systems • Previous Articles     Next Articles

SRAM-Based FPGA Systems for Safety-Critical Applications: A Survey on Design Standards and Proposed Methodologies

Cinzia Bernardeschi1, Luca Cassano2*, Member, IEEE, Andrea Domenici1   

  1. 1 Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa 56122, Italy;
    2 Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano 20133, Italy
  • Received:2013-12-21 Revised:2014-10-10 Online:2015-03-05 Published:2015-03-05
  • About author:Cinzia Bernardeschi received her Laurea degree and Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1987 and 1996 respectively, both from the University of Pisa. She is an associate professor with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa. Her research interests are in the area of software engineering, dependable systems and application of formal methods for specification and verification of safety-critical systems. Her most recent work is related to the application of theorem proving and model checking techniques for fault simulation and reliability analysis of electronic circuits and systems.

As the ASIC design cost becomes affordable only for very large-scale productions, the FPGA technology is currently becoming the leading technology for those applications that require a small-scale production. FPGAs can be considered as a technology crossing between hardware and software. Only a small-number of standards for the design of safety-critical systems give guidelines and recommendations that take the peculiarities of the FPGA technology into consideration. The main contribution of this paper is an overview of the existing design standards that regulate the design and verification of FPGA-based systems in safety-critical application fields. Moreover, the paper proposes a survey of significant published research proposals and existing industrial guidelines about the topic, and collects and reports about some lessons learned from industrial and research projects involving the use of FPGA devices.

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