Certifying Embedded Applications Running on PolarFire® SoC FPGAs

Enhancing Embedded System Security and Reliability with SoC FPGAs

Manufacturers across industries are leveraging new System-on-Chip Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (SoC FPGAs) along with advanced software technologies to develop new platforms and capabilities, making what was once impossible widely available. While these technologies enable innovation, the challenge of assuring these new systems are safe, reliable and secure is becoming much more complex and costly.

Microchip and LDRA provide a robust solution where reliable hardware, secure architecture and verified software can all work collectively to provide a future-proof foundation for building reliable and secure embedded systems. This blog post highlights how the integration between the LDRA tool suite and our PolarFire^® SoC FPGAs can reduce software certification costs and risks.

Technology is rapidly evolving in all markets and changing our day-to-day lives. Vehicles from automobiles to heavy equipment are becoming more autonomous, and in some cases capable of operating without a human driver. Robots are used to perform tasks ranging from maintenance inspections in harsh environments to performing medical procedures on patients with precision no human can achieve. Drone applications include power line inspection, disaster prevention and smart agriculture. In some cases, vehicles, robots and drones can even work collaboratively to perform more complex tasks. What was once science fiction is quickly becoming reality.

While the possibilities seem endless, a huge challenge in developing these systems is ensuring that they operate correctly, safely and securely. An area of particular concern is assuring and certifying embedded software, which is compounded by the trend of increasing software content in embedded systems. Consider the average number of lines of software code per vehicle in 2015 was 100 million, and that number doubled by 2020. Goldman Sachs Research believes this number could reach as much as 650 million lines of code by 2025.

In addition to driving growth in software content, the adoption of new software technologies has led to the emergence of new and newly revised safety and security regulations and standards. As a result, larger and often more distributed teams of software developers are needed to develop and verify the software. The impact of all these changes is that the level of effort, costs and risks associated with assuring software is safe, secure and complies with functional safety and cybersecurity standards have grown exponentially.

The LDRA tool suite is a flexible platform for producing safety, security and mission-critical software in an accelerated, cost-effective and requirements-driven process. The tool suite’s open and extensible architecture integrates software life-cycle traceability, static and dynamic analysis, and unit and system-level testing. It is structured to provide eight core capabilities and is sufficiently modular to allow the provision of each to be added as the need arises.

To support large and distributed development teams, an optional web application is available that automatically aggregates reports and results from the LDRA tool suite including (but not limited to) code reviews, code coverage analysis and unit testing results. Imported reports and results across multiple users and projects are collected and used to generate advanced visualizations that provide actionable insight across both large and targeted sets of verification data. The automatic data aggregation is designed to support CI/CD workflows and ensures the latest results and reports are always available.

The tool suite enables safety and security-critical software development teams to achieve certification or approval per rigorous standards in:

• Aerospace and Defense (DO-178C, DO-254, DO-278, Def Stan 00‑56)
• Automotive (ISO 26262, ISO/SAE 21434, Automotive SPICE)
• Industrial and Energy (IEC 61508, IEC 62443-4-1, IEC 60880, ISO 13849)
• Medical (IEC 62304)
• Rail Transportation (EN 50128, EN 50176)

The components of the tool suite are available in several industry productivity packages that align with industry-specific software development and verification needs.

LDRA’s integration with our PolarFire RISC-V SoC FPGAs and development toolchains allows developers to verify software operates safely and securely throughout the software development lifecycle. The integration provides several capabilities including:

• Directly integrating with the SoftConsole IDE used for PolarFire development, allowing users to see static analysis results and track code coverage directly in the IDE.
• Importing SoftConsole project files and tracking build processes to ensure accurate analysis scope.
• Using the SoftConsole device programming environment to automate unit testing, regression testing, and code coverage analysis.
• Accessing the mcycle pseudo-register to gather effective and accurate timing data in Microchip’s RISC-V environment.
• Supporting CI/CD platforms to extend DevOps to include safety and security analysis, verification and reporting.

Figure 1 - The LDRA tool suite integration with Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGA

To learn more about the LDRA tool suite and its integration with our PolarFire SoC FPGAs, please visit the LDRA website or contact info@ldra.com.