Validation of an On-Chip Watchdog for Embedded Systems Exposed to Radiation and Conducted EMI

C. OLIVEIRA , J. BENFICA , L. M. BOLZANI POEHLS , F. VARGAS , J. LIPOVETZKY; J. LIPOVETZKY; , A. LUTENBERG , E. GATTI , F. HERNANDEZ

Conferencia; Programmable Logic (SPL), 2014 IX Southern Conference on; 2014

Due to stringent constraints such as batterypowered,high-speed, low-voltage power supply and noiseexposedoperation, safety-critical real-time embedded systems areoften subject to transient faults originated from a large spectrumof noisy sources; among them, conducted ElectromagneticInterference (EMI) and radiation. As the major consequence, thesystem?s reliability degrades. In this paper, we present the mostrecent results involving the validation analysis of a hardwarebasedintellectual property (IP) core, namely Real-TimeOperating System - Guardian (RTOS-G). This is an on-chipwatchdog that monitors the RTOS? activity in order to detectfaults that corrupt tasks? execution flow in embedded systemsrunning preemptive RTOS. Experimental results based on thePlasma processor IP core running different test programs thatexploit several RTOS resources have been developed. During testexecution, the proposed system was aged by means of totalionizing dose (TID) radiation and then, exposed to conductedEMI according to the international standard IEC 61.000-4-29(voltage dips on the VDD power pins). The obtained resultsdemonstrate the proposed approach provides higher faultcoverage and reduced fault latency when compared to the native(software) fault detection mechanisms embedded in the kernel ofthe RTOS.