Intermittent Resistance Fault Detection at Board Level

interconnection reliability issues threat the dependability of highly dependable systems. One of the most challenging interconnection-induced reliability threats is intermittent resistive faults (IRFs). They may occur randomly in time, duration and amplitude in every interconnection. The occurrence rate can vary from a few nanoseconds to months. As a result, evoking and detecting such faults is a major challenge. In this paper, IRF detection at the board level has been investigated by introducing a new digital IRF monitor. This monitor has been validated by using hardware-based fault injection. Two widely used on-board transmission protocols —UART and SPI —have been used as case studies. In addition, one fault management framework —based on the IJTAG standard —has been implemented to collect and characterize information from the monitors. The experimental results show that the proposed monitor is effective in detecting IRFs at the board level.