MicroFaultTolerant (/spl mu/FT)-a system for achieving cost effective fault tolerance in microcontroller based equipment

Abstract

MicroFaultTolerant (/spl mu/FT) is a method for designing and implementing microcontroller based equipment which interacts with its environment and has a risk connected to its operation thus making fault-tolerance and fail-to-safe properties necessary. We are especially concerned about systems where the "safe" states change at non-deterministic intervals with describing values changing continuously. In this paper we propose a method for achieving fault-tolerance and fail-to-safe properties, regarding certain particularly relevant error classes, in microcontroller based equipment.