How to Close the Gap between Hardware and Software Using FMEA

This paper will discuss the role of FMEA in bridging the gap between hardware and software development with focus on improving system fault management. Many product fault management issues stem from software development not being aligned with hardware development. Typically, when hardware is involved in developing a new platform or product, through designing new architecture and ASICs with new features, the software team is still busy with previous release sustaining issues. The importance of time to market and reduction of development time has impacted and compounded this gap. Software designers may get a chance to look at the product requirement document and provide some type of input. Soon after they are busy addressing previous release bugs. This process is repeated from one product to the next. What happens is that the software designer due to lack of hardware information tends to mask interrupts basically ignoring them. This design approach has the tendency to produce a less than desirable product with marginal fault management capability. Another important issue is product complexity. As the distance between the hardware and software engineer increases and products become more complex, it is normal to encounter more issues in the subsequent product, than the previous release or platform. The paper will describe the process of how to start a FMEA, team selection, how to perform FMEA, who and when to perform the FMEA, types of FMEAs, who are the potential customers of a FMEA, how to communicate the results to the management and how to validate failure modes