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Design for Reliability (DfR) in Space Life Support

The engineering process of Design for Reliability (DfR) is well established in the automotive and aerospace industries. DfR should be useful in the future development of space life support systems. DfR is a sequence of tasks that develop system requirements and plan reliability analysis and testing. First and fundamentally, the reliability requirement is defined. Next the system reliability model is developed, often using a reliability block diagram. The overall system reliability requirement is allocated to the subsystems and an estimate of the attainable reliability is made. This expected reliability can be improved by simplifying the design by removing components or by replacing less reliable components. Improving reliability can require difficult compromises, such as reducing performance requirements, increasing budget, or extending testing. The actual system reliability can be determined only by testing, which should continue long enough to provide the required confidence in the measured value. New systems often have unexpected design errors that cause failures in early testing. The usual reliability improvement process of testing, finding the failure modes, and redesigning to remove them reduces the failure rate and is referred to as “reliability growth.” After redesign has been completed, the system should be further tested to determine the actual achieved reliability more accurately. If the final system failure rate is too high, redundant systems can be used to improve overall operational reliability. Adding redundancy simply to increase the one- or two-fault tolerance metric may sometimes reduce reliability. Reliability can be improved in three ways: redesigning the system to include more reliable subsystems and components, reliability growth testing and failure mode removal, and by using parallel redundant systems. DfR should combine these approaches to achieve the required reliability while managing performance, cost, and schedule.

Reliability↗

Design for Reliability (DfR) in Space Life Support

The engineering process of Design for Reliability (DfR) is well established in the automotive and aerospace industries. DfR should be useful in the future development of space life support systems. DfR is a sequence of tasks that develop system requirements and plan reliability analysis and testing. First and fundamentally, the reliability requirement is defined. Next the system reliability model is developed, often using a reliability block diagram. The overall system reliability requirement is allocated to the subsystems and an estimate of the attainable reliability is made. This expected reliability can be improved by simplifying the design by removing components or by replacing less reliable components. Improving reliability can require difficult compromises, such as reducing performance requirements, increasing budget, or extending testing. The actual system reliability can be determined only by testing, which should continue long enough to provide the required confidence in the measured value. New systems often have unexpected design errors that cause failures in early testing. The usual reliability improvement process of testing, finding the failure modes, and redesigning to remove them reduces the failure rate and is referred to as “reliability growth.” After redesign has been completed, the system should be further tested to determine the actual achieved reliability more accurately. If the final system failure rate is too high, redundant systems can be used to improve overall operational reliability. Adding redundancy simply to increase the one- or two-fault tolerance metric may sometimes reduce reliability. Reliability can be improved in three ways: redesigning the system to include more reliable subsystems and components, reliability growth testing and failure mode removal, and by using parallel redundant systems. DfR should combine these approaches to achieve the required reliability while managing performance, cost, and schedule.

Reliability↗

Engineering Trade-off Considerations Regarding Design-for-Security, Design-for-Verification, and Design-for-Test

The United States government has identified that application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware are at risk from a variety of adversary attacks. This finding affects system security and trust. Consequently, processes are being developed for system mitigation and countermeasure application. The scope of this tutorial pertains to potential vulnerabilities and countermeasures within the ASIC/FPGA design cycle. The presentation demonstrates how design practices can affect the risk for the adversary to: change circuitry, steal intellectual property, and listen to data operations. An important portion of the design cycle is assuring the design is working as specified or as expected. This is accomplished by exhaustive testing of the target design. Alternatively, it has been shown that well established schemes for test coverage enhancement (design-for-verification (DFV) and design-for-test (DFT)) can create conduits for adversary accessibility. As a result, it is essential to perform a trade between robust test coverage versus reliable design implementation. The goal of this tutorial is to explain the evolution of design practices; review adversary accessibility points due to DFV and DFT circuitry insertion (back door circuitry); and to describe common engineering trade-off considerations for test versus adversary threats.

Design for reliability (DFR)↗