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A Dependable Microcontroller-based Embedded System

Authors:
Amir Rajabzadeh
Mahdi Vosoughifar

Keywords: dependable system; control flow checking method; concurrent error detection; microcontroller-based system; embedded system.

Abstract:
This paper presents a method to make a dependable microcontroller-based system for detecting any violation from the program flow caused by transient faults. The method is based on a duplication and comparison technique and employs a “synchronous interrupt” in both microcontrollers to monitor and compare the program counters (PCs) of the microcontrollers. This is done by adding an interrupt service routine in both microcontrollers and without any modification of the application programs. The method has been experimentally evaluated using AVR ATMega-32 microcontrollers. The results show that error detection coverage of the method is 100% based on the fault models. The error detection latency varies about 1184 cycles (74 sec) to 128147 cycles (8 msec) and the execution time overhead of the method varies between 0.5% and 50% for different PC exchange interrupt frequencies. The hardware and software overheads are about 100% and less than 0.5% respectively.

Pages: 24 to 29

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: August 21, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4324

ISBN: 978-1-61208-149-6

Location: Nice/Saint Laurent du Var, France

Dates: from August 21, 2011 to August 27, 2011