Hardware software codesign of a safety-critical embedded computer system for an automatic endoscope

Hardware-software codesign is presented for a safety-critical embedded computer system. The system is applied for endoscope control and navigation. The embedded system architecture provides high performance computing for real-time implementation of machine vision algorithms and fault-tolerance for patient safety. It consists of five processor cores, local memory, I/O interface and multi-port shared memory. The hardware and software system architectures are co-designed. A virtual hardware is developed to execute the application and system software tasks. The system is designed and modeled using VHDL and Eaglei toolset. We have limited system verification to co-verification of system hardware architecture and fault-tolerance strategies. Co-verification results indicate that the system performance degrades gracefully under various fault scenarios.

1. INTRODUCTION

The applications of embedded computer systems range from sophisticated aircraft flight control to consumer electronics. The high volume embedded applications include home appliances, automobiles, parking systems, cellular phones, toys, and many other devices that contain some sort of μ-controller. On the other extreme are safety-critical applications like fly-by-wire aircrafts, high-rise building elevators and medical instruments. The essential features of safety-critical embedded systems like endoscope are high performance, fault-tolerance and adaptability of the system. The architects of such system are facing high throughput and reliability demands that have never before been required of these systems. The system architecture has to provide fault-tolerant hardware support that can be programmed to implement software fault-tolerant strategies [1], [2].