It's essential to balance reliability, security and time-to-market for today's embedded applications.

Embedded systems designers often believe they must make difficult tradeoffs between security, reliability, and time-to-market. Most usually decide to prioritise time-to-market, with reliability second and security a distant third. But times change. Security is emerging as a requirement for all devices with network connectivity, so third isn't so distant anymore.

Advances in microprocessors, operating systems and development tools also mean these tradeoffs are no longer as difficult to balance. It's possible to design for higher reliability, build the necessary foundation for security, and even get to market faster.

This can only be done by choosing the right architecture—a combination of processor, operating system, and software components—and design from the outset for high levels of reliability. Some amount of reliability can be "tested in" to a product using proven architectures and development techniques. But high reliability—the kind you must build a bulletproof solution—has to be designed in from the start. It can't be added on or tested into existence.

It's engineering common sense to design an application in a modular way, dividing the application into software components and controlling their interaction through well-defined interfaces. But delivering the highest levels of reliability takes more: the ability to partition, isolate, and separate, not just modularise.

For the highest levels of reliability, modules must be placed in memory regions that are isolated from one another. In addition, the processor's memory-management hardware, along with a suitable operating system, must be used to control communication and machine resources as well as enforce separation.

Hardware separation can, unsurprisingly, provide higher levels of reliability. What may be surprising is that it can also get complex products to market faster.