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These already exist, for example it is very difficult to build biomedical software that gets hooked up into a living thing - even if you use it only for research. In practice such a hard realtime guarantee can only be met by a devices like an FPGA. All of this is in a code.

Real issue here is why such codes don't exist for for this particular problem.



In practice such a hard realtime guarantee can only be met by a devices like an FPGA.

There have always been fully deterministic CPUs around for that purpose. The simpler the system, the better; just hook a Forth chip to a memory without caches and you're set.


Do you have any experience with Forth chips? I've been looking for an excuse to play with the GreenArray devices.


No, but I don't see any flaw in that design. Indeed, it seems like the case of Hoare's "obviously no deficiencies" in a system design.

I believe that the GreenArrays people, setting aside the $450 dev board, also had some notes on making cheap breadboards with their chips or something like that. I don't have a link handy, though. ;/


Could try calling their sales folks and see if a rep will just sample it.


You can code bugs and security failures into a FPGA as well as in software.


Yes, but you depend less on bugs caused by levels of abstraction below your code, such as runtimes, OSes etc.


Between writing and formally verifying HDL, logic synthesis (often using third-party or vendor-provided blocks or soft IP, mind you), behavioral and logic simulation (software!), layout, MDP, and building test harnesses that actually test the final hardware, I would actually trust a lower-level language compiled using a well-known compiler and running on a small RTOS on a proven CPU more than I'd trust a new design synthesized into FPGA or especially ASIC form.


Only a win if you have some reason to believe your code will be any less buggy when you inevitably start on your own ad-hoc reimplementations of those abstractions.




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