The essence of reliability estimation during operational life for achieving high system dependability

System dependability has become important for critical applications in recent years as technology is moving towards smaller dimensions. Achieving high dependability can be supported by reliability estimations during the operational life. In addition this requires a workflow for regularly monitoring reliability and taking necessary repair actions. This has been proposed as a possible solution where degradation in system-level performance parameters, being directly influenced by variations and degradation in device-level parameters, has been considered a potential possibility for estimating reliability during the operational life of a system. Furthermore, the degradation rate of these system-level performance parameters depends on the initial values dispersion as a result of fabrication-related process variations. This requires a database of initial and runtime system-level performance parameters at every start and at every potentially anticipated critical time-point of the system. Therefore, initial system specifications at the design-time and runtime performance parameter measurements stored in the database are used to estimate reliability and taking necessary actions for enhancing system dependability via repair. Simulation results for an example target system in a LabVIEW environment fully support the proposed idea.