TASKING Blogs

Undefined Behaviors in ISO-C: Their Effect on Your Embedded Software Part 1 Optimizing compilers sometimes give you...well, unexpected results. You have probably seen this before, but maybe wasn’t sure what happened and why. This two-part blog is about the undefined behaviors that exist in ISO-C, the way optimizing compilers make use of it, which is often not well-understood by programmers, and the unpredictable software bugs that result from it and frequently show up in code that is attempting security checks. Although Read Article

Seamless Project Collaboration Language EnglishSub Title: Redefine your engineering workflow with easy-to-use collaboration technology that enables clear communication across projects.Video: Vidyard: Features: Managed ProjectsIn-Editor CollaborationDesign CommentingViews Benefits: Managed Projects Work confidently with trusted design assets that are centrally secured and available for use by your entire design team. In-Editor Collaboration Get designs done faster than ever by Read Article

Self Driving Car Safety Statistics Support Early Implementation When I think about self-driving cars, the first question that pops into my mind is, “When are they going to get here?” I’m tired of driving myself around town and getting stuck in traffic! You might ask the same question if you are a software developer for autonomous vehicles or cars with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Up until now, the answer has been, “When they’re extremely safe.” In the United States, the National Highway Traffic Read Article

How an Interrupt Driven Embedded System Can Save You Power What is an interrupt driven system? Our lives revolve around energy. This is a fact I’m reminded of every time there’s a bad storm in my area and the electricity goes out. In the world of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) power also reigns supreme. Semi-autonomous and self-driving cars need more and more sensors to operate effectively, making low power operation increasingly important. It just so happens that how you interact with all of Read Article

How Autonomous Vehicle Map Building Benefits ADAS Vehicles. It’s always been interesting to me that the explorers of the past were cartographers. It makes sense, there was no point in exploring something new if you weren’t able to map it out and show it to the people back home. Even today map makers are still on the edge of the unknown, although this time the frontier is autonomous navigation. Vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are becoming more numerous each day, and most of them Read Article

Advantages of Sensor Fusion With GPS in ADAS Vehicles When I think of the Global Position System (GPS), or any global navigation satellite system (GNSS), I don’t associate it with, “cutting-edge technology.” Especially not when it’s connected with autonomous vehicles or cars with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). GPS has been in use for years now, and while it’s quite useful for showing us where to go around town, it hasn’t been considered suitable for any kind of self-driving applications Read Article

Survey of Autonomous Vehicle Tracking With GPS Navigation Systems I for one, am very thankful for the Global Positioning System (GPS). While most animals in nature are born with an innate sense of direction, I was born with natural misdirection. That’s why I use my phone’s GPS to get everywhere I’m going. GPS is a relatively old technology that could find new uses in autonomous vehicles or cars with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Everyone is busy trying to find the right mix of sensors to navigate Read Article

Electromagnetic Interference in Vehicles With Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Editorial credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock.com Some people like to say that, “ignorance is bliss.” If you don’t need to understand something, why bother? Personally, that idiom doesn’t jive with me, I enjoy learning about new things and find that seemingly unrelated knowledge can often help me in my work or life in general. As a software developer you may not have concerned yourself much with the world of electromagnetic interference (EMI). It’s Read Article

How to Use Pointers in C: Avoiding Errors and Increasing Efficiency You know the saying, “With great power comes great responsibility.” You may have thought it only applied to Presidents or other “important” people, but I think it applies to us programmers as well. Especially when we’re coding in C and using pointers. Pointers are powerful, which makes them both useful and dangerous. If you’re not exactly sure when and where you should implement them, you’re not alone. Their primary purpose is to make your Read Article

Multiple Sensor Data Fusion: Raw Data vs. Object Data Incorporation There are some people who love GPS navigation systems and some who hate them. I usually trust mine, but when my father rides with me he’s always trying to get me to take some kind of shortcut that will get us lost. No matter which way we take, though, we always make it to our final destination. In the same way, there are several paths to take with multiple sensor fusion, namely early and late data incorporation. Both will likely leave you with Read Article

Embedded C Static Analysis Tools and ADAS Vehicle Data Validation My mother loves to use expressions when she talks and one of her favorites is, “take it with a grain of salt.” Just in case you don’t know, that saying means you should question what that person is telling you. This idiom is very applicable when it comes to incoming sensor data in vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Incomplete or incorrect data can lead to a car deducing false negatives or positives. It’s important that your Read Article

Autonomous Vehicle Cyber Security: Safety Within and Without Cybersecurity is of the utmost importance. Approximately 143 million Americans were reminded of this when Equifax, a credit company, was hacked and their data was compromised. If Equifax had followed industry best practices, this breach could have been avoided. Since they didn’t, millions of Americans are now at risk of identity fraud. When it comes to self-driving cars, or vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), the stakes are a Read Article

Use ASIL Aware Static Analysis to Detect Memory Interferences Corruption of Memory Content This blog is about “ASIL Aware Static Analysis of Memory Interferences”, a novel technique to detect and repair memory interferences which has been implemented in the TASKING Safety Checker tool. My previous blog about “Weaknesses in defenses against memory interference” explained the state of the art to ensure freedom from memory interference and showed that the prevailing solutions have limitations such as Read Article

Weaknesses in Defenses Against Memory Interference Freedom from Interference You are right if you consider taking enough sleep as a safeguard against memory interference. However this blog is not about interferences that affect our human memory and learning capabilities. Instead it is about how memory interferences are detected and resolved in today's safety critical software systems. Nevertheless there are quite a few similarities between a psychological and a software engineering view on memory Read Article

Future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Need Wireless Connections The cars of today are significantly more advanced than the ones made even 10 or 20 years ago. Most of these advancements have been made under the hood, without the users really knowing or understanding what changed. One such adjustment that needs to happen is a move from physical conductors to wireless connections for data transfer in cars. ADAS cars have many barriers to hurdle, and weight and space requirements are one of them. An explosion of Read Article

Fulfilling Requirements for Advanced Automotive Development Safety-critical software functions required in a car are traditionally placed in separate, single-core Electronic Control Unit (ECU). With this practice, it’s easy to ensure that different functions with potentially different functional safety requirements and Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) are physically insulated and protected against interference from each other. Today, it is common to combine many of these single core ECUs into a Read Article

The Death of Optimizing Compilers...Or is it? Recently I came across the tutorial "The Death of Optimizing Compilers" () from Daniel J. Bernstein, professor of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology and research professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This tutorial was originally presented at ETAPS the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software. Since I earn my living at TASKING, a compiler company, it made sense to check his Read Article