Lifetime Reliability Optimization for Embedded Systems: A System-Level Approach

This paper presents an automatic reliability-aware system-level design methodology to tolerate hardware defects caused by manufacturing tolerances as well as destructive agents and aging processes at the places of activity of the system components. This is achieved by (1) integrating the capability of a redundant placement of software tasks in an automatic design process to cope with the hardware defects, (2) providing an automatic lifetime reliability analysis to trade off the arising costs in favor of the achieved reliability increase, and (3) proposing a software architecture for the runtime phase. Real-life case studies from the automotive domain illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. Keywords— Embedded Systems, Lifetime Reliability, Dependability, Analysis, Optimization, Design Space Exploration, System-Level