Safety Functions on Commodity Hardware with Diversified Encoding

Currently, hardware designed and certified for safety-critical systems is one important building block for any safety-critical application. Such hardware provides the detection of execution errors. However, many modern safety-critical applications, like autonomous driving, require features and performance levels that are not available from safety-certified hardware. One solution to this problem is to use hardware that is not certified for safety-critical systems, for example consumergraded hardware, but that fulfills the feature and performance requirements. Additionally, a software solution provides the detection of execution errors. This paper introduces such a software solution called “Diversified Encoding with Coded Processing”. Due to its hardware-independence, this solution provides the flexibility to build safety-critical systems from non-safety-critical hardware components. This solution can be automated with a code transformation tool to further increase the flexibility.