Monitoring operating temperature and supply voltage in achieving high system dependability

System dependability being a set of number of attributes, of which the important reliability, heavily depends on operating temperature and supply voltage. Any change beyond the designed specifications may change the system performance and could result in system reliability and hence dependability problems. These reliability problems could be short-term variations and can be solved if the system returns back to its normal operational temperature and supply voltage. Therefore, these reliability problems should be differentiated from the other long-term reliability problems resulting from aging mechanisms. These are a function of stress time and have a cumulative nature. This differentiation is essential to better manage the system dependability during its operational life. This separation of two reliability problems requires a regular monitoring of the system operating temperature and the supply voltage during its operational life. The problem has been solved in the proposed hardware architecture and workflow that takes this monitoring into account to tackle them separately and carries out proper actions in order to enhance the system dependability. The simulation results for a target system carried out in LabVIEW environment fully support the proposed idea.