A system-level platform for dependability enhancement and its analysis for mixed-signal SoCs

The long-term functionality of any electronic system poses some requirements on the dependability of that system. Especially for critical systems it is becoming a crucial property with increasing system complexity and shrinking technology dimensions. Analog and mixed-signal systems are an important part of these critical systems. Until now little effort has been put into dependability of analog and mixed-signal systems, especially front/back-ends. This paper presents a new system-level platform for enhancing and analyzing the dependability of analog and mixed-signal front-ends in SoCs. Markov analysis has been used to theoretically investigate the dependability enhancement of these analog and mixed-signal front-ends based on this platform. Simulations in VHDL-AMS have also been conducted for an example target system consisting of a temperature sensor, operational amplifier and ADC to illustrate this platform. The gain parameter of the whole system, taken as an example of potential dependability hazard, has been investigated and enhanced based on this platform. The results show that this proposed platform is effective and has the potential to investigate and enhance dependability at system level.