Do you have an application that needs to detect and react on ECC corruption? If yes, how do you test and verify your application's behaviour?
Basics:
ECC stands for Error Correcting Code and is used for error corrections e.g. on memory that must be free of single bit errors. ECC can correct one-bit errors and detect 2-bit errors. ECC needs on 32 bit 7 check bits and on 64 bits 8 check bits.
Now let's assume your embedded application stores e.g. electrocardiogramm data in memory (with ECC) and writes it later to disk. If there is an error, your application needs to react because data diversification can't be tolerated.
But how can you test such a scenario? ECC errors occur very seldom, sometimes there is no error for years - so how can you verify your application's behaviour?
iSYSTEM has a solution. Since winIDEA 9.12.19 you can induce ECC corruption manually using Hardware/Tools/Memory dialog.
In the dialog you set the address and size of memory to corrupt.
Please note that if this is done indiscriminately, the device can be rendered permanently unusable. Currently supported devices are MPC5xxx.
Comments