Reliable health monitoring and fault management infrastructure based on embedded instrumentation and IEEE 1687

Semiconductor products manufactured with latest and emerging processes are increasingly prone to wear out and aging. While the fault occurrence rate in such systems increases, the fault tolerance techniques are becoming even more expensive and one cannot rely on them alone. Rapid emergence of embedded instrumentation as an industrial paradigm and adoption of respective IEEE 1687 standard by key players of semiconductor industry opens up new horizons in developing efficient on-line health monitoring frameworks for prognostics and fault management. The paper describes a cross-layer framework capable of handling soft and hard faults as well as the system's degradation. In addition to mitigating/correcting the faults, the system may systematically monitor, detect, localize, diagnose and classify them (manage faults). As a result of such fault management approach, the system may continue operating and degrade gracefully even in case if some of the system's resources become unusable due to intolerable faults. The main focus of this paper is however to discuss the dependability properties of the Fault Management framework itself and related infrastructure.