Why current memory management units are not suited for automotive ECUs

Abstract

A major trend in automotive industry is to enrich driver and passenger experience with an increasing amount of consumer electronics and car-2-x functionality. A close interaction between this added functionality and the classical automotive domains allows for innovations that are valuable to the end customer and cannot be outplayed easily by devices with a pure consumer electronic origin. Innovations of this class require a tight coupling, for instance by executing programs from both worlds on the same microprocessor. The latter introduces many challenges, especially regarding reliability, security and safety of such systems. A unified memory management fulfilling the requirements of the consumer electronics and automotive application could help to address these issues and is a challenge by itself. This paper shows that the prevailing implementation scheme for memory management units (MMUs) is not suited for the needs of such systems and points out a solution direction.