Abstract

Leandro Lanzieri, Goerschwin Fey, Holger Schlarb, Thomas C. Schmidt,
Auto-Generating Ageing Self-Tests with Hardware in the Loop for Commercial Microcontrollers,
In: Proc. of 31st IEEE European Test Symposium, IEEE Press, May 2026.
[html][BibTeX][Abstract]

Abstract: Safety-critical systems increasingly deploy microcontrollers, for which the monitoring of hardware ageing is vital to avoid unexpected malfunctioning. In previous work, we introduced a deployable software-based method for ageing monitoring in commercial microcontrollers that requires no architecture-level knowledge of the devices, as it estimates the maximum error-free operating frequency using variable-length timing windows. While effective, manually constructing optimal computing payloads for self-tests remains challenging and can limit coverage of critical paths or subsystems specific to the hardware. In this paper, we complement our technique with an automated generation of the self-test firmware. We explore several approaches for generating computing payloads using hardware in the loop (HiL) evaluation on commercial microcontrollers, including a pure random generation and evolutionary strategies. In the evolutionary approach, we investigate two mutation mechanisms: random selection, and contextual bandit algorithms. Our evaluations on real hardware and surrogate hardware models show the impact of evaluation budget and algorithm selection on the effectiveness of automatic self-test generation. Results reveal that random generation is well suited to reduced HiL explorations, while evolutionary strategies benefit from extended evaluations. Our HiL-based technique is able to produce firmwares with up to double the degradation sensitivity as the functional tests provided by the vendor.

Themes: Internet Measurement and Analysis , Internet of Things

 

This page generated by bibTOhtml on Wed Feb 25 12:05:03 AM UTC 2026