A Fast and Secure Pipelined Barrel Processor for Safety-Critical Applications for Real-Time Operating Systems
Mong Tee Sim, Darshika G. Perera · 2019
Security, reliability, and efficiency are crucial traits of the microprocessors used for safety and mission critical applications. Conventional microprocessors are typically not suitable for these applications, mainly because these processors do not support architectural-level protection including thread isolation, which in turn could lead to security vulnerabilities in embedded systems. In this case, a single erroneous thread could cause catastrophic failure of the whole system. Also, with conventional microprocessors, no specific defense mechanisms are provided to prevent foreign invaders such as viruses from attacking the system. This could become a significant problem especially for safety and mission critical applications that are typically real-time systems. In this paper, we introduce novel and unique pipeline barrel processor (PBP) architecture for safety and mission critical applications for real-time operating systems. Our PBP microprocessor is designed in such a way to alleviate the aforementioned issues, by comprising following features: fine-grained multi-tasking using single pipeline assembly, dynamic allocation of CPU cycles, memory partitioning at the architectural level, execution code regions at the hardware level, and global variables and stack protections. Experiments are performed to evaluate our PBP microprocessor, and to verify the correctness and functionality of the microprocessor design.