Towards dependability-aware design of hardware systems using extended program state machines

Due to the continuous shrinking of the transistor sizes which is strongly driven by Moore's law, reliability becomes a dominant design challenge for embedded systems. Reliability problems arise from permanent errors due to manufacturing, process variations, aging as well as soft errors. As a result, the hardware will consist of unreliable components and hence, the development of embedded systems has to change fundamentally. Therefore, we propose a dependability-aware design approach for hardware systems through integrating dependability into a state-of-the-art system-level design language. Our approach is based on SystemC and extends the Program State Machine model to explicitly observe, diagnose, and compensate faulty behavior. Different compensation mechanisms like run-time reconfiguration or mechanisms for error propagation can be used by the designer during refinement. They are controlled by a new exception-like mechanism. Furthermore, our approach aims to integrate functional verification as well as dependability verification with respect to given fault models.