HRT-PLRU: A New Paging Schemefor Executing Hard Real-Time Programson NAND Flash Memory

For advanced features of next generation vehicles, the real-time programs in automotive embedded systems are dramatically increasing. For such large volume program codes, this paper proposes a novel framework to use high-density and low-cost nonvolatile memory, i.e., NAND flash memory, as a low-cost means of storing and executing hard real-time programs. Regarding this, one challenge is that NAND flash memory allows only 2 KB page-based read operations not per-byte random accesses, which requires RAM as working storage for code executions. This paper proposes two solutions, i.e., partitioned RAM solution and shared RAM solution, that minimize the RAM size required to deterministically guarantee the deadlines of all the hard real-time tasks. The proposed solutions are verified with the actual real-time programs for unmanned autonomous driving. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that allows us to use NAND flash memory for hard real-time program executions with the minimal usage of RAM.