Navigating FAA CAST-32A and AC 20-193 Multicore Processor Certification

Core aerospace engineering and protocols for Multicore Avionics Certification.

The Challenge of Multicore Silicon in Aviation

Single-core processors are becoming obsolete, forcing aerospace OEMs to adopt commercial multicore chips. However, when Core 0 and Core 1 compete for the same DDR memory controller, unpredictable latency spikes occur, violating determinism.

Mitigating Contention via Hardware Bandwidth Regulators

AvionicsNodes follows FAA AC 20-193 (formerly CAST-32A) guidelines: hardware memory regulators and cache-partitioning techniques establish deterministic bandwidth ceilings for each core, proving that worst-case execution times remain strictly bounded.

Interference Channel Analysis: Identifying cross-core contention on shared L2/L3 caches.
Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET): Proving deterministic execution with all cores under maximum load.
Core Deactivation vs. Throttling: Enforcing deterministic memory bandwidth quotas.
AC 20-193 Compliance: Assembling rigorous multicore airworthiness certification dossiers.

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