Thought Leadership

Mixed criticality white paper

By Colin Walls

My working life includes a lot of writing – blogs, articles, conference papers and white papers are typical of what I produce. A common factor of my writing is that it is aimed to be technical and instructive. What I do not like writing is sales pitches. I can accept that a few product details at the end of a paper, that illustrate one way to achieve results, makes sense; after all, I work for a company that wants to sell stuff!

I am pleased sometimes when I get feedback …

I have always contended that delivering good technical material helps the sales process, as, all being well, the audience get a clear idea of our fields of expertise, which will stand us in good stead when they are searching for a product or solution. I have always tried to avoid having the word “marketing” in my job title, as many people just assume marketing material is just lies and exaggerations [which, in some companies/industries, is true]. I always want to give the impression that I am a fellow engineer.

I was very pleased when I heard that, at a recent conference, my colleague was chatting with a participant who said that he held Mentor white papers in high regard, as they contained solid technical material and no sales pitch. My colleague took the opportunity to introduce him to a new white paper, that I co-authored and has just published. The topic is multicore systems and mixed criticality – when part of a system is critical and may need certification. The paper talks about how such systems might be configured to leverage the multicore architecture to certify only the parts that require this treatment. You can download a copy, free of charge, from here.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/embedded-software/2019/10/14/mixed-criticality-white-paper/