RELIABILITY AND MODELING OF SYSTEMS INTEGRATED WITH FIRMWARE AND HARDWARE

摘要

Firmware is embedded software in hardware devices and they are important for many critical systems' function Most of the study on software reliability deals with systems during development, and it is important to study the integrated system during operation. Complex systems usually have a bathtub shaped failure rate over the lifecycle of the product. This paper discusses the parametric analysis of the distributions generated from Pareto and Weibull distribution as well as their possible application to modeling firmware system failure In addition, the Safety Integrity Levels (SIL) stipulated in IEC 61508 are taken into account in the modeling since the safety-critical systems in general are firmware-dominated.