Today’s and future applications tend to offer more functionality, including direct interaction with humans, being connected, work collaboratively as well as autonomously.

This includes:

• Collaborative devices and equipment
• Autonomous vehicles and robots
• Medical equipment (surgical Robots or defibrillators)
• Power Equipment (grid Control, Power Plant control)
• ECUs (include more functionality in ECUs found in Trains, Cars and other heavy machinery)

Combining the Need for fast, precise and deterministic controls with the Functional Safety Requirements and Cybersecurity Demands result often in addl. workloads:

• Small changes , additional features or bringing products into the safety scope, results in redesigns, additional hardware and software. This adds time and cost to the development of secure safety critical systems.
• Safety functions conflict with the Desire for unrestricted collaborative or autonomous use of devices.
   

But with great features also come great responsibilities which results in the need to take protective or corrective action to prevent potential unwanted actions that can lead into material damage and/or human injuries.

Requirements

Safety requires certifiable HW and SW. At the same time a lot of functionality that is found and demanded by the Market, does not have a Functional Safety nor a Cybersecurity approach.

In the Bible for functional safety requirements, it states:
“Functional safety is the part of the overall safety of an electronic system or piece of equipment  which depends on automatic protection operating correctly in response to its inputs or failure in a predictable manner.”
 

Certain basic Safety and Security Requirements must be considered in all vertical Markets no matter if Industrial, Medical, Transportation or Automotive. They are slightly different per vertical as the demands of each market are different as well.

But not all the Functions are Safety relevant, a clear Safety concept is essential for the design of the Product.

The RTS Safe HV basic concept is based on separation

CPU cores, IO devices, portions of memory can be assigned to individual VMs exclusively. This allows for spatial and temporal isolation as required for freedom from interference, Hard Real-time and determinism. At the same time direct access to assigned resources is possible. (pass through)
Standard device drivers can be used without HV awareness.

The RTS Safe HV is as transparent as possible while always maintaining the Safety and Security.

It does not require any integration effort. Resource assignment is a matter of configuration and can be done by the integrator without having all the specifics of the HW and the system.

The RTS Safe HV will be provided for Intel Atom, Core, and Xeon and is compatible with Intel’s FuSa Concept.

It's based on a Safety Island integrated into the SoC or external.

• PCI pass-through to exclusively assigned devices
• Which devices are used by which OS is configurable