Exploiting Application Tolerance for Functional Safety

Prasanth, V and Parekhji, R and Amrutur, B (2021) Exploiting Application Tolerance for Functional Safety. In: 2021 IEEE International Test Conference, ITC 2021, 10-15 Oct 2021, Virtual, Online, pp. 399-408.

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Abstract

As the use of safety critical systems is becoming more prevalent, there is a need to reduce the implementation overhead required to provide safety. The conventional design of such systems does not consider application behaviours, thereby resulting in a pessimistic design where the safety provided is often not required during large periods of the application execution. In this paper, we analyse the different phases of an application during its overall execution life cycle, together with the embedded threads to perform specific operations, and propose a new methodology for protection of the safety critical application threads. We show the benefits of this method and the ability to build lower cost systems which are functionally safe using the flexibility which is embedded inside the application itself. Two new application based protection schemes, based on altering the application execution parameters (e.g. control loop frequency) and redundant execution of selective threads, are proposed. For these experiments, we have used commercial off the shelf components without any hardware functional safety features and implemented safety measures by augmenting the application software. Experiments on Electric Vehicle Traction (EVT) and On-Board Charger (OBC) applications indicate overall MIPS savings between 70 to 95. These results indicate that a careful design of the application can itself be the first step to protect the integrated circuits which drive them. © 2021 IEEE.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publication:	Proceedings - International Test Conference
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Keywords:	Embedded systems; Life cycle; Radiation hardening, Application based protection; Application behaviors; Application execution; Application tolerances; Conventional design; Functional Safety; Overall execution; Safety critical applications; Safety critical systems; Soft error mitigations, Application programs
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Communication Engineering
Date Deposited:	01 Feb 2022 12:35
Last Modified:	01 Feb 2022 12:35
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/71199

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