Design for prognostics in electronic circuits and systems

Despite improvements in design for testability techniques such as JTAG that widely has been accepted by industries, current VLSI technologies have still failed to implement a complete on-chip health monitoring mechanism. A reason is JTAG has been specifically developed for fault detection rather than fault prediction, prognostic, diagnostic, and reasoning. Hence, there might be benefits to enhance the design for testability techniques with health management capabilities, and further employ it in heterogeneous distributed systems (HDS) where a number of VLSI devices, electronic boards, and systems are employed in industrial applications, such as aerospace. This actually enhances both JTAG and HDS with Built-In-Health-Test, scalability, reliability, etc. This project ultimately aims to develop a design for prognostic technique versus design for testability technique. The Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Centre is a major collaborative venture at Cranfield, started in 2008, with funding from the East of England Development Agency (EEDA); a consortium of core industrial partners, (Boeing, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Meggitt, Thales, MOD and Alstom); and from EPSRC. The investment, over the first 5 years of operation, was approaching £10M. We are now in our eighth year of operation and the Centre has grown into other sectors (rail, energy, health and agriculture), and is financially self-sustaining; many of the partners (and others) are funding Applied Research projects and there is a growing revenue from EPSRC, TSB and EU funded work.