Towards normal design for safety-critical systems
FASE'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering
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FPGAs are being used in increasingly complex roles in critical systems, interacting with conventional critical software. Established safety standards require rigorous justification of safety and correctness of the conventional software in such systems. Newer standards now make similar requirements for safety-related electronic hardware, such as FPGAs, in these systems. In this paper we examine the current state-of-the-art in programming FPGAs, and their use in conventional (low-criticality) hardware/software systems. We discuss the impact that the safety standards requirements have on the co-development of hardware/software combinations in critical systems and suggest adaptations of existing best practice in software development that could discharge them. We pay particular attention to the development and analysis of high-level language programs for FPGAs designed to interact with conventional software.