Introducing SW-based fault handling mechanisms to cope with EMI in embedded electronics: are they a good remedy?

We summarize a study on the effectiveness of two software-based fault handling mechanisms in terms of detecting conducted electromagnetic interference (EMI) in microprocessors. One of these techniques deals with processor control flow checking. The second one is used to detect errors in code variables. In order to check the effectiveness of such techniques in RF ambient, an EIC 61.000-4-29 normative-compliant conducted RF-generator was implemented to inject spurious electromagnetic noise into the supply lines of a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) microcontroller-based system. Experimental results suggest that the considered techniques present a good effectiveness to detect this type of faults, despite the multiple-fault injection nature of EMI in the processor control and data flows, which in most cases result in a complete system functional loss (the system must be reset).