Maintenance Consideration for Long Life Cycle Embedded Systems

When an embedded electronic system has a life cycle that is much longer than the life cycles of its components, system maintenance becomes an important design metric to consider. We have been formalizing the maintenance problem by the definition of an optimization model. This model results in a schedule for the maintenance activities such that the overall maintenance cost will be minimized. We have reason to believe that system on FPGA having soft defined microprocessors, peripherals and memory controllers will be beneficial in terms of cost for maintenance. Soft defined hardware systems will allow the software to live longer without need for updates.