Maximizing diversity in CPUs: Using GPUs as coprocessors to achieve safety integrity

摘要

Modern System-on-Chip (SOC) architectures offer much for a relatively small price, but often industrial machine builders only use a fraction of the functionality. Their main interest is the performance boost by using multiple cores. For safety devices, the on-chip redundancy is beneficially to achieve higher reliability, but since most platforms are homogenous, there is a need to get systematic and common cause failures under control. Graphics Processing Units (GPU???s) are more and more available in modern SOCs, but their utilization in industrial products is still marginal. This paper proposes a concept how GPUs can improve the overall safety integrity with additional diversity in hardware and software.