The focus on safety-critical applications in both the automotive and industrial markets is significantly growing, bringing new and added pressures to systems engineers as they work to solve safety challenges.

Mobile devices are literally choking on data. With video, photos, and music challenging embedded systems to keep up with overwhelming amounts of data, we explore how tree-based file systems can improve responsiveness and take some of the burden off processors to manage throughput.

To support the requirements of automotive functional safety applications, Freescale has introduced the dual-core MPC564xL MCU family. This family contains two “channels” that each consist of a core, bus, interrupt controller, memory controller and other core-related modules. The channels can operate in either one of two distinct operating modes: a Lockstep Mode (LS Mode or LSM) and a Decoupled Parallel Mode (DP Mode or DPM). This paper2 provides suggestions how DPM can be utilized and describes additional measures that are necessary to compensate for the lack of hardware level checking that is provided in LSM.