Self-testing in embedded systems: Software failure
Colin Walls, Mentor Graphics
embedded.com (February 23, 2016)
All electronic systems carry the possibility of failure. An embedded system has intrinsic intelligence that facilitates the possibility of predicting failure and mitigating its effects. This two-part series reviews the options for self-testing that are open to the embedded software developer, along with testing algorithms for memory and some ideas for self-monitoring software in multi-tasking and multi-CPU systems. In part one, we looked at self-testing approaches to guard against hardware failure. Here in part two, we look at self-testing methods that address software malfunctions.
As was mentioned in the introduction to part one, the acceptance of possible failure is a key requirement for building robust systems. This is extremely relevant when considering the possibility of software failure. Even when great care has been taken with the design, testing and debugging of code, it is almost inevitable that undiscovered bugs lurk in all but the most trivial code. Predicting a failure mode is tough, as this requires knowledge of the nature of the bug that leads to the failure and, if that knowledge were available, the bug would have been expunged during development.
The best approach is to recognize that there are broadly two types of software malfunction: data corruption and code looping. Some defensive code can be implemented to detect these problems before too much damage is done.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Process/Voltage/Temperature Sensor with Self-calibration (Supply voltage 1.2V) - TSMC 3nm N3P
- USB 20Gbps Device Controller
- SM4 Cipher Engine
- Ultra-High-Speed Time-Interleaved 7-bit 64GSPS ADC on 3nm
- Fault Tolerant DDR2/DDR3/DDR4 Memory controller
Related White Papers
- Designing low-energy embedded systems from silicon to software
- Role of Embedded Systems and its future in Industrial Automation
- From I2C to I3C: Evolution of Two-Wire Communication in Embedded Systems
- Android, Linux and Real-Time Development for Embedded Systems
Latest White Papers
- Fault Injection in On-Chip Interconnects: A Comparative Study of Wishbone, AXI-Lite, and AXI
- eFPGA – Hidden Engine of Tomorrow’s High-Frequency Trading Systems
- aTENNuate: Optimized Real-time Speech Enhancement with Deep SSMs on RawAudio
- Combating the Memory Walls: Optimization Pathways for Long-Context Agentic LLM Inference
- Hardware Acceleration of Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) in Large-Scale Systems