On-Line Testing in Continuous Operation of Embedded Systems: Modeling and Performance Evaluation

Testing is vital for nowadays electronic systems. The related testing process consists in applying tests and verifying the obtained results. This should be performed without stopping the system under which useful applications are running. In this work, an on-line testing approach which allows tests to be applied in situ without any system perturbation is proposed. Using, optical probes fault effects are extracted through electro-optic phenomenon. By using the extracted optical signals, the proposed approach benefits from the capability of sending a huge number of optical information that are related to tests. For circuits whose size varies from a mm to tens of cm, optical information can be sent in parallel with the application under execution.