Immunity Aware Programming facts for kids

Immunity aware programming is a set of programming techniques used while writing firmware for an embedded system. It is used mainly to overcome random errors that can occur in the CPU program counter or register set, RAM or any other that can cause failure of the "victim" device. Such random errors may be caused by single event upsets, not enough power, or by strong electromagnetic signals transmitted by some other "source" device.

Most of these techniques apply to the software in the "victim" device to make it more reliable while few of these techniques apply to software in the "source" device to make it send out less unwanted noise. For these reasons Immunity aware programming is one kind of:

1. Defensive programming.
2. EMC Aware Programming.

Images for kids

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  Cause and effect figure. The cause must be determined, so the problem can be fixed.

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  Token passing as execution flow control

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  C source: token passing with global function ID.

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  C source: token passing with function parameters

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  Program memory filled with code, NOPs, and error handler

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  Memory before and after the implementation of both function token and NOP-Fills

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  An experimental analysis of CPU time overhead and the amount of duplicated variables

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  C sample code: function parameter duplication

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  C sample code: duplication of test conditions

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  Branch duplication

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  Hard- and software combination: detection of power supply fluctuation using an AD-converter