Impact of the application activity on intermittent faults in embedded systems

Future embedded systems are going to be more sensitive to hardware faults. In particular, intermittent faults are going to appear faster in future technologies. Understanding the occurrence of faults and their impact on systems and applications can help to improve the fault-tolerance of systems. However, there is no study on their effects in more complex digital circuits. We propose an experimental platform for accelerating and catching the occurrence of intermittent faults in complex digital circuits. We experimentally show that intermittent faults can appear during the lifetime of the circuit, very early before the wear-out period. We studied the impact of processor activity on intermittent faults rate. We conclude that a continuous usage of circuits causes the occurrence of intermittent faults earlier than a low usage under identical operating conditions. We show that applications do not have the same sensitivity to intermittent faults.