The Cortex-R52 has been designed to address functional safety in systems that must comply with the stringent requirements of ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3. As such, the core is suited to systems that demand advanced safety features, alongside efficient and responsive execution.
According to James McNiven, general manager of ARM’s CPU and media processing groups: “The Cortex-R52 is the first processor built on the ARMv8-R architecture and was designed from the ground up to address functional safety. We are helping partners to meet particular market opportunities, especially in fully autonomous vehicles and robotics systems where specific functionality is required for safety-critical tasks.”
The Cortex-R52 offers hardware enforced separation of software tasks to ensure safety critical code is fully isolated. This allows the hardware to be managed by a software hypervisor policing the execution and resourcing of tasks. By enabling the precise and robust separation of software, the Cortex-R52 decreases the amount of code that must be safety-certified, so speeding up development as software integration, maintenance and validation is easier. The processor also deals with increased software complexity while delivering the determinism and fast context switching that real-time systems demand.
STMicroelectronics has licensed the processor and will use it to create integrated SoCs for automotive applications. Fabio Marchiò, general manager of the company’s automotive digital division, noted: “The Cortex-R52’s ability to compartmentalise software provides our users with the best solution for safety without loss of determinism. Its virtualisation support simplifies the consolidation of applications and functions into a single processor, delivering a shorter integration time.”
