Traditionally, fail-silent computers are implemented by usingmassive redundancy (hardware or software). In this research weinvestigate if it is possible to obtain a high degree of fail-silentbehavior from a computer without hardware or software replication byusing only simple behavior based error detection techniques. It isassumed that if the errors caused by a fault are detected in time itwill be possible to stop the erroneous computer behavior, thuspreventing the violation of the fail-silent model. The evaluationtechnique used in this research is physical fault injection at the pinlevel. Results obtained by the injection of about 20000 different faultsin two different target systems have shown that: in a system withouterror detection up to 46% of the faults caused the violation of thefail-silent model; in a computer with behavior based error detection thepercentage of faults that caused the violation of the fail-silent modewas reduced to values from 2.3% to 0.4%; the results are very dependenton the target system, on the program under execution during the faultinjection and on the type of faults
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