Course Purpose
In this course, the students will (a) be introduced to typical faults and their causes that occur in embedded systems at the lowest levels of abstraction, (b) learn about countermeasures that can be applied at different levels, and (c) apply countermeasures and analyze their costs and effects to be able to design high-quality, i.e., dependable and cost-efficient, embedded systems.

Content
Embedded systems typically consist of a combination of processors, hardware accelerators, and communication infrastructure. This course will at first introduce faults and their causes (e.g. radiation effects or aging effects like NBTI) that occur in the system components and then discuss how faults propagate in the system all the way up to the applications. Afterwards, focus is put on countermeasures that can be applied to enhance the system’s dependability. Here, different levels of abstraction like the circuit, register transfer, microarchitecture, and the system level and respective techniques that typically apply redundancy in either space or time to increase the reliability are covered. As will be shown, these techniques do not come for free, but their cost and effect needs to be considered. Thus, the lecture will introduce dependability analysis techniques (e.g. BDD- and success tree-based analysis) that enable to quantify the cost and benefits of applied techniques. Finally, the lecture will put emphasis on the aspect of design automation. Here, techniques for the automatic and efficient integration of dependability-enhancing techniques (e.g. based on meta-heuristics like Evolutionary Algorithms) across different levels of abstraction are introduced.

Credits: 5