Adaptive Hardware In Autonomous And Evolvable Embedded Systems

Meeting the high demands of outer space missions requires immense efforts and is exceedingly time consuming. For the latest accomplished missions, the engineering of the hardware and computing systems took years and must be completed before launch. The architecture of a Network on Chip (NoC) based System on Chip (SoCs) is presented in this paper. These SoCs capable of partial reconfiguration at runtime are a new paradigm in the embedded world and show advantageous implications to different problems. Autonomous systems can be designed which dynamically adapt to the environment within their functional scope, subsequent updates can easily be submitted as plain source code due to the integrated design flow, and the robustness is increased using an on-board simulation model. FPGAs are used in space for a long time. In future space missions and other industrial domains, reconfigurable embedded SoCs as specified in this paper will play an increasing major role. Due to the growing functional spectrum, flexible and powerful architectures are needed. On the one hand, to easy and shorten the development process. On the other hand, to meet the high and stringent demands in the field.