Embedded system design with maintenance consideration

This paper deals with the problems of maintaining a long lifetime embedded system, including obsolescence, function change requirement or technology migration etc. The aim of the presented work is to analyze the maintainability of long lifetime embedded systems for different design technologies. FPGA platform solutions are proposed in order to ease the system maintenance. Different platform cases are evaluated by analyzing the essence of each case and the consequences of different risk scenarios during system maintenance. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that the FPGA platform with vendor and device independent soft IP is the best choice.