Intermittent Failures in Hardware and Software

Intermittent failures and no fault found (NFF) phenomena are a concern in electronic systems because of their unpredictable nature and irregular occurrence. They can impose significant costs for companies, damage the reputation of a company, or be catastrophic in systems such as nuclear plants or avionics. Intermittent failures in systems can be attributed to hardware failures or software failures. In order to diagnose and mitigate the intermittent failures in systems, the nature and the root cause of these failures have to be understood. In this paper we have reviewed the current literature concerning intermittent failures and have a comprehensive study on how these failures happen, how to detect them and how to mitigate them.

[1]  Harry A. Schafft.  Failure Analysis of Wire Bonds , 1973 .

[2]  Pedro J. Gil,et al.  Analysis of the influence of intermittent faults in a microcontroller , 2008, 2008 11th IEEE Workshop on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems.

[3]  D. Lumbard,et al.  Investigating no fault found in the aerospace industry , 2003, Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2003..

[4]  Ralph E. McCullough.  Screening Techniques for Intermittent Shorts , 1972 .

[5]  Brian Randell.  System structure for software fault tolerance , 1975 .

[6]  B. Steadman,et al.  Reducing No Fault Found using statistical processing and an expert system , 2002, Proceedings, IEEE AUTOTESTCON.

[7]  David Blaauw,et al.  Static electromigration analysis for on-chip signal interconnects , 2003, IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst..

[8]  Rajan Ambat,et al.  On the electrochemical migration mechanism of tin in electronics , 2011 .

[9]  C. Constantinescu,et al.  Intermittent faults and effects on reliability of integrated circuits , 2008, 2008 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium.

[10]  Yu Hu,et al.  IVF: characterizing the vulnerability of microprocessor structures to intermittent faults , 2010, DATE 2010.

[11]  Michael G. Pecht,et al.  No-fault-found and intermittent failures in electronic products , 2008, Microelectron. Reliab..

[12]  Larry V. Kirkland.  When should intermittent failure detection routines be part of the legacy re-host TPS? , 2011, 2011 IEEE AUTOTESTCON.

[13]  M. Pecht,et al.  Failure mechanisms based prognostics , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management.

[14]  Peter Söderholm.  A system view of the No Fault Found (NFF) phenomenon , 2007, Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf..

[15]  Karthik Pattabiraman,et al.  Comparing the effects of intermittent and transient hardware faults on programs , 2011, 2011 IEEE/IFIP 41st International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops (DSN-W).

[16]  Manuel Blum,et al.  Self-testing/correcting with applications to numerical problems , 1990, STOC '90.

[17]  Tim Koch,et al.  A Bond Failure Mechanism , 1986, 24th International Reliability Physics Symposium.

[18]  Michael G. Pecht,et al.  The "trouble not identified" phenomenon in automotive electronics , 2002, Microelectron. Reliab..

[19]  Jonathan Swingler,et al.  Intermittency phenomena in electrical connectors , 2001 .

[20]  Rajan Ambat,et al.  Electrochemical migration of tin in electronics and microstructure of the dendrites , 2011 .

[21]  B. Steadman,et al.  Intermittent Fault Detection and Isolation System , 2008, 2008 IEEE AUTOTESTCON.

[22]  John C. Knight,et al.  A Framework for Software Fault Tolerance in Real-Time Systems , 1983, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[23]  Algirdas Avizienis,et al.  The N-Version Approach to Fault-Tolerant Software , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[24]  Laurie A. Williams,et al.  Does Hardware Configuration and Processor Load Impact Software Fault Observability? , 2010, 2010 Third International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation.

[25]  Michael R. Lyu.  Software Fault Tolerance , 1995 .

[26]  Sanghamitra Roy,et al.  Analysis of intermittent timing fault vulnerability , 2012, Microelectron. Reliab..

[27]  Jeff Punch,et al.  Corrosion Resistance of Copper-Coated Contacts , 2006 .