If you design a system that doesn't eliminated all single points of failure, eventually your safety-critical system will kill someone. How often is that? Depends on your exposure, but in real-world systems it could easily be on a daily basis."Realistic" Events Happen Every Million HoursUnderstanding...
Safety Requires No Single Points of Failure
If someone is likely to die due to a system failure, that means the system can't have any single points of failure. The implications for this are more subtle than they might seem at first glance, because a "single point"...
Problems Caused by Random Hardware Faults in Critical Embedded Systems
A previous posting described sources of random hardware faults. This posting shows that even single bit errors can lead to catastrophic system failures. Furthermore, these types of faults are difficult or impossible to...
Random Hardware Faults
Computer hardware randomly generates incorrect answers once in a while, in some cases due to single event upsets from cosmic rays. Yes, really! Here's a summary of the problem and how often you can expect it to occur, with...
