Design and verification of embedded instruments for detecting intermittent resistive faults in electronic systems

No-fault-founds (NFFs) threaten the dependability of highly-dependable systems in the avionic and car industries. Moreover, they drastically increase the test and maintenance costs. One of the main causes of NFFs is intermittent resistive faults (IRFs). These faults can occur randomly in terms of time, duration and amplitude in every interconnection. The occurrence rate can vary from a few nanoseconds to months, making the evocation and detection of such faults a major challenge.

This thesis tackles IRF detection at the chip and board levels. First, the characteristics of IRFs have been extracted by observing two main causes of IRFs in boards: cold-solder joints and loose connectors, under thermal cycling experiments. Based on these measurements, a representative model of IRFs has been introduced and employed to develop an IRF generator. The proposed IRF generator facilitates the study of IRF effects on digital systems. In order to analyse the effect of IRFs at the transistor level, a software-based IRF generator has been developed. A hardware-based IRF generator has been built to evaluate IRFs at the board level. The measurement results show that cold-solder joints and loose connectors can cause IRFs, and that IRFs can evolve under thermal cycling and eventually become permanent faults.