Handling manufacturing and aging faults with software-based techniques in tiny embedded systems

Non-volatile memory area occupies a large portion of the area of a chip in an embedded system. Such memories are prone to manufacturing faults, retention faults, and aging faults. The paper presents a single software based technique that allows for handling all of these fault types in tiny embedded systems without the need for hardware support. This is beneficial for low-cost embedded systems with simple memory architectures. A software infrastructure and a flow are presented that demonstrate how the presented technique is used in general for fault handling right after manufacturing and in-the-field. Moreover, a full implementation is presented for a MSP430 microcontroller, along with a discussion of the performance, overhead, and reliability impacts.