PENTA project HADES (Hierarchy-Aware embedded test infrastructure for Dependability and performance Enhancement of Systems) has improved the functional safety of Electronics Components and Systems in order to prevent dangerous failures or to control them as they occur.
Today’s electronic systems require high reliability and functional safety. The “Manufacture and forget”
approach has been phased out and equipment vendors are expected to provide support through the entire lifetime of their products. The solution is to use test features to manage reliability challenges, increase operational lifetime and support extended operating environments and dynamic applications.
HADES provides solutions for self-test and self-diagnosis of Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) while improving their dependability. More specifically, the project aims at embedding into SoC networks multiple embedded test instruments (ETIs) for both analog and digital Intellectual Property (IP) cores that are interfaced to a common digital test infrastructure. The ETIs equip the SoC with key capabilities such as reliability monitoring to alert the end-users before the failures occur, on-line self-test to detect failures due to latent defects and aging, and data collection for failure diagnosis purposes. ETIs also offer feedback for self-repair, performance optimisation, and reliability enhancement.
The goal is to design flexible ETIs that are reusable from post-manufacturing testing to online testing in the field of operation. The test interface is based on the new standard IEEE1687 which has allowed the possibility to build advanced hardware-software environments to monitor and control many different embedded instruments and related applications. Securing the test infrastructure has been of main concern to prevent unauthorised access that could result in stealing secret keys, performing memory dumping, and modifying memory values to get a privilege escalation. HADES goes beyond the state-of-the-art by moving from a classic design approach, based on a post-silicon fabrication test paradigm, to a new more efficient, scalable and low-cost on-line test approach
Read the full HADES impact summary here.