Design and Verification of Robust Architectures for Electronic Systems

The advent of the use of digital electronic technology in electronic systems has enabled unprecedented expansion of aircraft system functionality and evolution of aircraft function automation. As a result, systems incorporating such technology are used to implement aircraft functions that can affect the safe operation of the aircraft. Lightning can be a common cause threat to such systems, causing both hard (damage) and soft (digital upset) faults in digital electronics. Traditionally, redundancy has been used to avoid single point in failures (hard or soft faults) that could cause loss of an aircraft function affecting safe flight and landing. Relative to soft faults, “rapid” fault clearing has been implemented and evaluated to achieve system soft fault robustness. Analytic and empiric methods are being developed for design and verification of system fault tolerance robustness.