Industrial player
Bring-up of a custom card designed to secure and modernize an energy control platform.
The need
Ensuring the reliability of the new generation of controllers
As part of the renewal of its platform, our client asked us to develop a BSP on in-house hardware.
The challenge: to migrate to a complex NXP iMX8Mplus architecture while ensuring maximum security and flawless network redundancy for critical industrial environments.
To respect professional secrecy and confidentiality agreements, the identity of our clients and certain technical details are intentionally anonymized. We primarily work on strategic, high-value-added innovation projects, for which discretion is essential to preserving our clients' competitive advantage.
The Challenge
Mastering asymmetry and security
Initially, we actively participated in the hardware bring-up, collaborating with the client's hardware teams (based in the US) to validate their custom board. This work notably required taking into account the management of specific LPDDR4 and eMMC memory.
Since security is an important aspect of this topic, we have implemented a chain of trust, from the implementation of a complete Secure Boot, to the implementation of an update system and the encryption of data.
Finally, we implemented an AMP architecture to enable interprocessor communication between the Linux (Cortex-A53) and real-time (Cortex-M7) cores of the IMX and enabled the HSR (High-availability Seamless Redundancy) Ethernet protocol via the KSZ9477 switch.
9/10
NPS survey
3
projects entrusted
Our approach
Expertise and continuous integration
The team consisted of a project manager, an embedded systems expert (bring-up, kernel, security) and an embedded Linux integration engineer (Buildroot, drivers, CI/CD).
We carried out a risk analysis using the E-Bios RM method, combining expertise in resource commitment for the material bring-up and a fixed price with a commitment to results for the BSP and security.
We have implemented a CI/CD under GitLab with Docker environments to ensure reproducible builds.
The result
RESULTS & TIMELINE
Successfully completed over eight months, this project delivered a complete BSP (Building Service Platform) along with specific distributions tailored to the plant, production, and development requirements. Supported by a secure update system and comprehensive design documentation, the solution is currently undergoing validation on target systems and knowledge transfer.
An iterative collaboration that made it possible to mitigate hardware risks early and deliver a hardened software platform, ready for business application integration.
Fabien Thomas
Technical Manager ECS Nantes
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