ARC EM Safety Islands are supported by safety documentation, including failure modes, effects and diagnostic analysis reports that help in the ISO26262 compliance process. In addition, Synopsys has unveiled the ARC MetaWare Development Toolkit for Safety, which it claims will ease the development, debugging and optimisation of ISO 26262 compliant software targeting ARC processors.
ARC EM Safety Islands are designed to meet the area and safety requirements of a broad range of automotive applications including advanced driver assistance systems, radar and sensors. The Islands are configurable and extendable to meet the performance, power and area requirements of target applications.
“Advancements in connected vehicles are requiring automotive designers to incorporate sophisticated processor solutions that not only address performance and power, but also safety,” said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP at Synopsys. “ARC EM Safety Islands integrate specific hardware safety features to help designers meet the most stringent ISO26262 requirements and to accelerate development of their automotive SoCs.”
Four IP cores are available. The ARC EM4SI is a dual-core lockstep processor solution based on the 32bit EM4 processor with single-cycle closely coupled memories. The ARC EM5DSI, based on the EM5D processor, adds more than 150 DSP instructions and a unified multiply/MAC unit to accelerate signal processing algorithms. Meanwhile, the ARC EM6SI and ARC EM7DSI offer the same functionality as the EM4SI and EM5DSI respectively, with up to 32kbyte of instruction and data caches.
The ARC EM Safety Islands include a range of safety-related features including: a self checking safety monitor; ECC logic; hardware stack protection checks; and an integrated watchdog timer.