First failure data capture in embedded system

First failure data capture (FFDC) is a technology that is used to capture diagnostic information when errors occur. This information reduces the need to reproduce errors. FFDC involves all firmware components. The processes and techniques of FFDC are crucial to the success of an embedded system. With a good FFDC implementation, software engineers can collect diagnostic data quickly and fix defects without impacting customer’s operation. One of the challengers with FFDC is collecting the useful data. There are cases where the volume of data collected is huge but only covers a short amount of time. In other cases, the collected data cover a long period time, but only gather a few variables or items. A new FFDC technique has been developed to capture useful data. This new FFDC technique captures very detail data for a short period of time and captures much less detail data for a long period of time. This paper first introduces three FFDC techniques. The three techniques are general dump, event trace and error log. Second, it analyzes the problems of current FFDC techniques. Third, it discusses a new FFDC technique. This new FFDC technique is low cost, efficient and good for data collection.