Towards MPSoC Enabled Subsea Embedded Systems for Fault Tolerant Applications

Devices combining System-on-Chip (SoC) multi-core processors with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are quite well known and have been used in industrial applications, but have no track record in oil and gas subsea systems. This paper proposes a new approach to subsea embedded electronic systems using the flexibility of programmable multiprocessor SoCs (MPSoCs) instead of bespoke designed printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs). A new platform is proposed and evaluated aiming to unlock the power of MPSoCs, which makes use of real-time processors for determinism, multi-core application parallelism for complex applications and programmable logic for easiness of interfaces, hardware acceleration and partial reconfiguration. Reliability issues are especially addressed given the difficulty to access and replace subsea embedded electronics. System performance test results on two MPSoC devices are presented and discussed in view of future subsea embedded systems implementation.