EMBEDDED SOFTWARE VALIDATION USING ON-CHIP DEBUGGING MECHANISMS

Everyday thanks to technological advances software of embedded systems is more complex and its increasing utilization for critical applications, makes necessary the development and later validation of fault tolerant embedded systems. Moreover, the increasing utilization of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components to develop such systems increases the necessity of verifying the behavior properties exhibited by each system component in presence of faults. To face this challenge, verification and validation techniques becomes essential to evaluate the fault tolerant properties of such embedded systems. But in order to obtain representative results of fault tolerance, the verification and validation processes have to be non-intrusive, mainly when evaluating fault tolerant real-time systems. Using the on-chip debugging capabilities available in most modern embedded systems it is possible to perform fault injection experiments in a non-intrusive manner and observe the system behavior in front of such faults. This paper argues how to use such on-chip debugging (OCD) facilities for verification and validation of fault tolerant real-time embedded systems constructed from COTS components integration.