On Line Testing Symposium 2003 Iolts 2003 9th Ieee

This book presents the theory behind software-implemented hardware fault tolerance, as well as the practical aspects needed to put it to work on real examples. By evaluating accurately the advantages and disadvantages of the already available approaches, the book provides a guide to developers willing to adopt software-implemented hardware fault tolerance in their applications. Moreover, the book identifies open issues for researchers willing to improve the already available techniques.

"This book covers aspects of system design and efficient modelling, and also introduces various fault models and fault mechanisms associated with digital circuits integrated into System on Chip (SoC), Multi-Processor System-on Chip (MPSoC) or Network on Chip (NoC)"--

This book introduces the concepts of soft errors in FPGAs, as well as the motivation for using commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGAs in mission-critical and remote applications, such as aerospace. The authors describe the effects of radiation in FPGAs, present a large set of soft-error mitigation techniques that can be applied in these circuits, as well as methods for qualifying these circuits under radiation. Coverage includes radiation effects in FPGAs, fault-tolerant techniques for FPGAs, use of COTS FPGAs in aerospace applications, experimental data of FPGAs under radiation, FPGA embedded processors under radiation and fault injection in FPGAs. Since dedicated parallel processing architectures such as GPUs have become more desirable in aerospace applications due to high computational power, GPU analysis under radiation is also discussed.

This book introduces a novel framework for accurately modeling the errors in nanoscale CMOS technology and developing a smooth tool flow at high-level design abstractions to estimate and mitigate the effects of errors. The book presents novel techniques for high-level fault simulation and reliability estimation as well as architecture-level and system-level fault tolerant designs. It also presents a survey of state-of-the-art problems and solutions, offering insights into reliability issues in digital design and their cross-layer countermeasures.

Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test is a guide to self-testing strategies for embedded processors. Embedded processors are regularly used today in most System-on-Chips (SoCs). Testing of microprocessors and embedded processors has always been a challenge because most traditional testing techniques fail when applied to them. This is due to the complex sequential structure of processor architectures, which consists of high performance datapath units and sophisticated control logic for performance optimization. Structured Design-for-Testability (DfT) and hardware-based self-testing techniques, which usually have a non-trivial impact on a circuit’s performance, size and power, can not be applied without serious consideration and careful incorporation into the processor design. Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test shows how the powerful embedded functionality that processors offer can be utilized as a self-testing resource. Through a discussion of different strategies the book emphasizes on the emerging area of Software-Based Self-Testing (SBST). SBST is based on the idea of execution of embedded software programs to perform self-testing of the processor itself and its surrounding blocks in the SoC. SBST is a low-cost strategy in terms of overhead (area, speed, power), development effort and test application cost, as it is applied using low-cost, low-speed test equipment. Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test can be used by designers, DfT engineers, test practitioners, researchers and students working on digital testing, and in particular processor and SoC test. This book sets the framework for comparisons among different SBST methodologies by discussing key requirements. It presents successful applications of SBST to a number of embedded processors of different complexities and instruction set architectures.

Computer-based systems have become omnipresent commodities within our - vironment. While for a large variety of these systems such as transportation systems, nuclear or chemical plants, or medical systems their relation to safety is obvious, we often do not re?ect that others are as directly related to risks concerning harm done to persons or matter as, for example, elevator control or mobile phones. At least we are not aware of the risk in our daily use of them. Safecomp as a community and a conference series has accompanied this - velopment for 30 years up to Safecomp 2009, which was the 28th of the series. During this time the topics and methods as well as the community have und- gone changes. These changes re?ect the requirements of the above-mentioned ubiquitious presence of safety-related systems. Safecomp has always encouraged and will further encourage academia and industry to share and exchange their ideas and experiences. After 30 years, we as the organizers of Safecomp 2009, found it imperative to take stock: which methods found their way into the application areas; which new approaches need to be checked for their practical applicability. As di?erent application domains developed their own approaches over the previous decades, we tried to attract people with di?erent backgrounds for this conference. - though the years 2008 and 2009 were not easy with regard to the overall global economic situation, we succeeded with this goal.

This book describes novel software concepts to increase reliability under user-defined constraints. The authors’ approach bridges, for the first time, the reliability gap between hardware and software. Readers will learn how to achieve increased soft error resilience on unreliable hardware, while exploiting the inherent error masking characteristics and error (stemming from soft errors, aging, and process variations) mitigations potential at different software layers.