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Using an MPU to Enforce Spatial Separation
Our latest White Paper, Using an MPU to Enforce Spatial Separation, is available for download.

System designers are now faced with the challenge of providing safety and functionality as part of the same system. In many cases safety critical systems have to support feature rich graphical interfaces, responsive networking communications, diagnostics, data storage and much more. Due to the rigors of developing safety critical software the development costs are high and it would not be feasible to develop all the software used within the system to the highest safety level required.

This means that within a single system there may be several different levels of safety software.

Therefore the software within the system needs to be partitioned, grouping software of the same safety level together, and ensuring that software from lower safety levels cannot interfere with software relating to the higher safety levels. Partitioning allows the safety related software to be kept small and concise, whilst allowing the use of third party software modules, which shortens development times and lowers costs.

This paper discusses techniques for achieving spatial separation or partitioning within mixed safety level embedded systems. Spatial separation is primarily concerned with ensuring that the accessing of physical system resources cannot lead to conflicts or corruption. Examples include access to Flash or RAM or system resources such as hardware peripherals.

Click here to download the White Paper.

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