Improved prognostic/diagnostic tools for fault-tolerant data buses

Ridgetop believes the technological advances in Prognostics and Built-in Self Test (BIST) can play a pivotal role in enabling the host electronic control unit (ECU) and its subsystems to assess their own viability and make on-the-fly corrections as required, or a transfer to redundant units. For critical applications such as FADEC systems, these techniques could offer improvements in operational reliability and perform, The Objective of this SBIR is to develop efficient redundancy management architectures for electronic engine and aerospace controls. The approach explored in this proposal will be to exploit concurrent self-testing architectures (concurrent Built In Self Test - BIST) rather that than strict adherence to using multiple redundancies of either hardware building blocks or software modules. The concept vision realizes that technology now exists that can produce a Self Deterministic (SD) Electronic Control Unit (ECU) for the host application. A Self Deterministic ECU (SD-ECU) can accurately assess its own State Of Health (SOH), it does not need to have a voting process take place among multiple peer ECUs for this determination to take place This Proposal will focus on one aspect of making the SD-ECU a reality. The development of a scaleable, concurrent, Data Stream Monitor.