A HW-dependent software model for cross-layer fault analysis in embedded systems

Abstract

With the advent of new microelectronic fabrication technologies new hardware devices are emerging which suffer from an intrinsically higher susceptibility to faults than previous devices. This leads to a substantially lower degree of reliability and demands further improvements of error detection methods. However, any attempt to cover all errors for all theoretically possible scenarios that a system might be used in can easily lead to excessive costs. Instead, an application-dependent approach should be taken, i.e., strategies for test and error resilience must target only those errors that can actually have an effect in the situations in which the hardware is being used. In this paper, we propose a method to inject faults into hardware and to formally analyze their effects on the software behavior. We describe how this analysis can be implemented based on a recently proposed hardware-dependent software model called program netlist. We show how program netlists can be extended to formally model the behavior of a program in the event of one or more hardware faults. First experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.