Failure Modes, Mechanisms and Analysis Methods for a Microcontroller-Based System on Chip

Different failure modes on a microcontroller-based SoC are presented. Several steps in the analysis needed to find the failure mechanism as well as prove "non-fails" amidst the maze of false positives and false trails, second-order effects, confusion and other challenges due to product complexity and the device's interaction with the embedded firmware (FW) are also discussed. The cases presented in this paper tackle issues that are related to FW, non-volatile memory (NVM), digital logic and analog modules.