Enabling Safer Embedded Systems

M ulti-core microprocessors and microcontrollers are

not new. But whereas the consumer electronics industry can live with dynamic allocation of threads to cores or a momentary freeze in reaction as a program or app starts-up, this is an unacceptable behaviour for safety critical applications that need to work correctly every time, regardless of what other tasks or activities may be active on the system at the same time. Recognising the industry-wide challenges and wanting to provide a forum to enable sharing of best-practise and lessons learnt, iSYSTEM teamed up with Timing Architects, Elektrobit and Infineon in 2015 to launch the Embedded Multi-Core Conference, or EMCC. The conference has a natural leaning toward the challenges faced by the automotive industry. Infineon’s TriCore™ processing architecture and continued development of its AURIX™ performant safety microcontrollers are often found in automotive applications and are the platform upon which iSYSTEM’s customers are often trying to analyse worst-case timing. Elektrobit, with their EB tresos software and tools, are commonly the AUTOSAR operating system upon which such automotive applications are built. And finally, as the application is analysed in order to provide the proof that ASIL safety levels can be achieved, Timing Architects’ TA Tool Suite is used to ensure optimal task-core mapping. iSYSTEM provides the data upon which these analyses can be made via its BlueBox™ On-Chip Analyser technology, extracting trace data from such multi-core targets over high-speed interfaces combined with clever code

instrumentation. In fact, such approaches are being developed into an industry-wide standard by iSYSTEM and other industry partners. The 2016 event’s word of the conference seemed to be “coherency”. Speaker after speaker highlighted that their biggest challenge in moving from the single-core to multi-core space revolved around ensuring that algorithms executing on different cores had access to coherent data, i.e. the data being used at any moment in time by one core is the most current and up-to-date version. Within the context of AUTOSAR, coherency is a challenge that the user has

had to develop solutions for themselves. Traditionally available solutions were found to be too demanding of the CPU, and requiring unacceptable data and program demands for their implementation. The result: some vendors have implemented their own, optimised, coherency solutions. Multi-core has not been the ‘Holy Grail’ to performance improvement that was once hoped for. Clearly, no-one expected the addition of a

second core to double performance. However, in the world of hard real-time embedded systems coupled with ASIL safety, a second core for some applications was barely delivering 30% of performance improvement. This year’s EMCC event runs from 20th - 22nd June with keynotes each day from Prof. Dr. Radermacher, University of Ulm, on Automotive Megatrends, and Dr. Mario Porrmann on Neuromorphic Computing - Disruptive Technology for Automotive Applications. A few tickets for the event still remain and can be booked by visiting isy.si/emcc.

Upcoming Events:

Embedded Testing 20th-22nd June 2017 NH München Ost Conference Center Includes our workshop, 2pm, 20th June on Test Automation with sepp.med GmbH. Discount code ET17_JK_10%

isy.si/et2017

Embedded Multi-Core Conference - EMCC 20th-22nd June 2017 Marriott Munich City East

isy.si/emcc

NXP FTF Connects 15th-16th August 2017 The Inn at St. John’s, Plymouth, MI

isy.si/nxp-ftf

Issue #03 June 2017

“The 2016 event’s word of the

conference seemed to be

‘coherency’.”

EMCC 2016 saw over 100 participants partake in

presentations and workshops.

Embedded World 2017 The iSYSTEM team participated at the Nürnberg Exhibition Centre for this key annual event targeting the embedded development industry. With our focus on Enabling Safer Embedded Systems, there were plenty of demonstrations on display highlighting how iSYSTEM’s products, together with those of third party partners and open-source projects, can be used together to improve quality of testing. Continuous Integration remained a hot topic with many visitors interested to see how Jenkins could be used within the context of embedded development. The more we have examined this platform, the more we become convinced of the value of continuous integration for regular testing of embedded application code. Most recently we have been examining how we can better integrate the results of our testIDEA reports into Jenkins. Thanks to Marko, our resident testIDEA expert, we now have a simple addition that enables the generation of code coverage output in a format that can be displayed by the Cobertura plug-in. This means that not only the code coverage achieved can be displayed but, in addition, it is possible to track the trend of testing strategy improvements. Furthermore, all of the currently available HTML-based reporting is just a click away via a link in your Jenkins project. The event also saw the introduction of a new YouTube star, Jackie the hamster. Our team in Slovenia, led by Anja, managed to put together a new video highlighting the expectations our customers have from our new iC5700 in measuring and proving the hard real-time performance of their multi-core and multi-ECU automotive applications. To prove the point, the iC5700 was on display together with the IOM6-CAN/LIN accessory, both

at the iSYSTEM stand, with collected data being shown within the winIDEA Analyser window, and that of Inchron, where real system timing data was fed into their Tool-Suite simulation environment based upon application code executing on the Renesas RH850.

Finally, our resident BugHunter stopped by the stand each day, promoting our technical blog. In total more than 170 visitors participated in our prize-draw to win a year’s Gold membership to the Elektor magazine. Our congratulations go to Alexander S from Germany, László G from Hungary and Slaviša Z from Serbia. Happy reading!

If you missed Jackie the hamster, feel free to drop by isy.si/jackie on YouTube. The Embedded Testing Conference Typically, most embedded events do not provide an in-depth focus on testing, whilst conferences that focus on testing neglect the specialised needs of the embedded software community. For several years now, this event, which is taking place again in Munich, has been righting this wrong, sharing industry experience around fulfilling the challenges of DO-178C, IEC61508, IEC62304 and ISO 26262. iSYSTEM will be joining together again with sepp.med GmbH to share our strategy for methodical test development based upon the Model-Based Testing strategy. Combined with the non-instrumented Original Binary Code (OBC) testing approach offered by iSYSTEM’s tools, our 4 hour workshop provides practical examples and useful strategies that can be used for everything from Unit to System Testing. Registration is still open and there is a discount for those entering the promotional code shown on page 1 (Upcoming Events) of this newsletter.

Issue #03, June 2017

“...we now have a simple

addition that enables the

generation of code coverage

output...that can be displayed by

the Cobertura plug-in”

The Cobertura plug-in within Jenkins displays code coverage status for your project. testIDEA will soon be able to export

its results in the required format.

Issue #03, June 2017

What’s behind those driverless cars? There is plenty of press coverage promoting the possibilities autonomous vehicles will be delivering society, and some of us may even have had the chance to experience autonomous control, even if it is was just an automatic parking capability. Children who have grown up with face-recognising smartphone apps, music track recognition software and Apple’s Siri, can be forgiven for thinking that the ‘heavy lifting’ that lies behind a feature like autonomous driving is more or less done. So how do we go about ensuring the next generation of potential engineers realises that a) there are still fun and exciting challenges ahead in our industry and b) what those challenges might look like? St. Georges, The English International School in Munich, works closely with industry to ensure that their pupils garner experience from specialists so that they might better be able to make appropriate choices for their studies and career direction. And, so it was that we found ourselves with a group of 8 to 15 year-olds in the school hall as part of the school’s “Science Week”, talking about driverless cars. The event started with a look at the history of driverless vehicles and what has been achieved to date. As far back as the 1940’s

there had been predictions on self-driving cars, with cars being ‘handed-off’ to their on-board computers through a sort of ‘air-traffic control’ center. The real breakthroughs that influenced the technology we have today came out of the DARPA challenges from around 2004, where autonomous vehicles had to navigate a course and make it back home in one piece. The pupils had, obviously, never actually driven themselves, so it was difficult for them to appreciate the varied challenges driving brings to a human. They have, however, learnt to cycle and, as part of their cycling proficiency tests, have learnt the meaning of the various road signs. This seemed like a good

focus for an activity, so we got the pupils to develop flow diagrams which described how to tackle road signs, such as speed limits and no-entry signs, as well as traffic lights. As a result of this activity, the pupils started to realise how complex even this small element of a driverless car would be to program. Not only that, we had created a lot of programs that were only capable handling an individual road sign. It became clear that, supporting road signs from other countries or even new road signs would be a massive programming task. This led on to the concept of programs that can learn, based upon neural networks. We asked ourselves if it would be possible to write a single program that emulated the brain that could be taught to recognise road signs. After a quick bit of science to explain how a computer’s camera evaluates colour, namely by splitting it into the proportion red, green and blue (RGB) light detected, we examined how our web cam evaluated the colours of our printed-out traffic lights. The proportions of “RGB” that related to the red, amber and green lights were then taught to the neural network before confronting it with our traffic A Processing sketch, combined with a web cam input, enabled

traffic light colours to be detected using a neural network.

Pupils started the event by developing flow-diagrams to describe how a computer should tackle reacting to a

wide range of traffic signs and driving situations

light picture. Overall, the recognition capability was pretty good, but similar colours, such as the light-blue edge of our traffic light picture, and even the black of the traffic light under certain lighting conditions, were mistakenly recognised as green.

This brought us around to the topic of “classification”. As an example, we got the pupils to describe the key features of a zebra. These were determined to be “black and white” in colour, four legs and a tail. The issue here is that there are many other animals that, from a photo, seem to have these features, such as panda or a badger. If we are going to make the detection capabilities of a neural network a success, we would need to ensure that we teach it about similar objects that are not the object we are intending to detect. For example, while teaching a neural network about zebras, we can also show it photos of pandas and badgers telling it that these are “not zebras”. This

process helps the neural network to improve its positive recognition of the wanted feature. We went back to the web cam and analysed how it saw the colours black, white and the blue frame. By teaching the neural network that these colours were “not red, amber or green” the accuracy of the detection was significantly improved. The kids really enjoyed the activities and it apparently led to a lot of discussion about driverless cars during the remainder of the day. For us, it was a great way to show that not all technical challenges have been solved, and that engineering as a career remains filled with exciting opportunities.

Meet the team Getting your team kitted out with the correct tools is never an easy task. There are adapters, licenses, power supply and cables to be chosen from a wealth of options. Thankfully, people like Sabrina are always on hand to help you out, bringing her many years of customer service and sales experience to the team. Since joining iSYSTEM back in January of 2016, she has been busy getting in contact with many of you providing upgrade

options for those looking to move to our latest BlueBox™ technology. If you have had the opportunity to meet us at one of the many industry events we attend each year, you can’t have failed to notice her warm welcome and readiness to listen to visitors needs. Out of the office she is often to be found grabbing the nearest guitar and engaging in the creation of musical entertainment. In fact, more than once she has been a major contributor to farewell parties for colleagues, Christmas party entertainment and other festivities in our German office.

iSYSTEM AG für

Informatiksysteme

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85247 Schwabhausen

Germany

Phone: +49(8138)6971-0

Fax: +49(8138)6971-46

E-mail: info@isystem.com

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DE128231221

Board of Management:

Erol Simsek, Werner Fischer,

Martin Gröstenberger

Responsible for the content

§ 10 Absatz 3 MDStV:

Erol Simsek

Issue #03, June 2017

Sabrina Kisslinger Sales Team Account Manager

The St. George’s pupils made us a card with messages of thanks

for the fun experience.

New connector strategy for 1.27mm connectors The connectors found on some microcontroller development boards are not really intended for a high number of insertions. With the move to the finer pitch, space-saving 1.27mm type connector, we have been experiencing an increased number of returns of such cables and connectors. In order to provide a more robust user experience, such connectors will, in future, be split into two pieces. The first part that connects to

our BlueBox™ On-Chip Analysers, will feature a robust 1.27mm socket with a keyed frame. The second part is a ribbon cable featuring two keyed connectors with strain-relief. This will help to minimise damage to the connection between the connector and cable. For target boards with limited space, a lower-cost connector is also fitted albeit without strain-relief. Targets initially benefitting from this change include the AURIX™ DAP and ARM® Cortex devices

with both 10 and 20-pin debug interfaces. For more information, please drop us a line or call your iSYSTEM sales representative.

1.27mm pitch connectors will be more robust with the introduction of connectors with strain relief.