Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance addresses the innovative topic of software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT), i.e., how to deal with faults affecting the hardware by only (or mainly) acting on the software.

The first SIHFT techniques were proposed and adopted several decades ago, but they have been the object of new interest in the past few years, mainly due to the need for developing low-cost safety-critical computer-based applications in fields such as automotive, biomedics, and telecommunications. Therefore, several new approaches to detect, and when...

New manufacturing technologies have made possible the integration of entire systems on a single chip. This new design paradigm, termed system-on-chip (SOC), together with its associated manufacturing problems, represents a real challenge for designers.

SOC is also reshaping approaches to test and validation activities. These are beginning to migrate from the traditional register-transfer or gate levels of abstraction to the system level. Until now, test and validation have not been supported by system-level design tools so designers have lacked the infrastructure to exploit all the...