Software integrity analysis enables automotive safety applications

“Having to balance the needs between transitioning from single-core to multi-core architectures while still maintaining industry-standard safety integrity levels, e.g. for ISO 26262 certification, is making it harder than ever to manage the software in today’s vehicles,” said Harm-André Verhoef, TASKING Product Manager, Altium. “This is why we introduced the TASKING Integrity Checker to help to identify and remove safety critical interference within automotive applications in the most efficient way possible for embedded software developers.”

Automotive safety integrity levels are an absolute must to guarantee safe and reliable execution of applications in the real-time environment of an automobile. Yet developers constantly struggle with the need to partition their applications and reduce the interference between software components while still maintaining the highest safety levels possible.

One way to achieve this goal in mixed criticality systems is to prove that low-level safety functions, like audio related applications, do not interfere with high-level safety functions, like braking systems. This so called ‘Freedom from Interference’ is the goal, but not an easy one to achieve in new multi-core architectures where more functions are being combined into one control unit.

The TASKING Integrity Checker provides embedded software developers with the needed tools to accomplish this task, including:

• The ability to work at the compiler level so that developers do not have to change the source code in an application.
• Information about memory allocated is already included, with unique ways to identify memory write/read access.
• Information about the safety classes of functions are built into the application, allowing developers to easily address the implementation of safety requirements with ASIL aware static analysis.

By making the TASKING Integrity Checker available as a stand-alone application, embedded developers will be able to create safe and reliable automotive applications, regardless of what architecture they are working on.

With the release of the stand-alone TASKING Integrity Checker, Altium continues its commitment of being the industry-leading compiler vendor for the development of advanced automotive applications. This stand-alone release will pave the way for easier implementation of advanced automotive applications that easily meet safety certification processes.