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In-flight upset - 154 km west of Learmonth, WA, 7 October 2008,

In-flight upset - 154 km west of Learmonth, WA, 7 October 2008,

In-flight upset - 154 km west of Learmonth, WA, 7 October 2008,

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3.6 Potential trigger types3.6.1 BackgroundAs discussed in section 3.4.10, the data-spike failure mode involved a disruption <strong>of</strong>processing activities within the ADIRU’s CPU module. The failure mode was also as<strong>of</strong>t fault; that is, it ceased to exist after the unit was powered <strong>of</strong>f.S<strong>of</strong>t faults can be triggered by a range <strong>of</strong> factors, such as a s<strong>of</strong>tware corruption or‘bug’, or a hardware anomaly triggered by some form <strong>of</strong> environmental factor(including physical environment factors, electromagnetic interference, or singleevent effects). Evidence relevant to each <strong>of</strong> these possibilities is provided in theremainder <strong>of</strong> this section.None <strong>of</strong> the effects <strong>of</strong> the data-spike failure mode were observed until the failuremode was triggered, and the effects recurred continuously until the unit was shutdown. <strong>In</strong> addition, the failure mode could not be replicated during subsequenttesting using a wide variety <strong>of</strong> potential triggers, indicating that the failure modecould only be triggered by either a rare event, or under rare circumstances. Thisbehaviour indicated that the disruption to the CPU module’s processing wastriggered by a single event rather than a series <strong>of</strong> events (that is, it was very unlikelythat a separate event triggered each data spike or other processing problem).3.6.2 S<strong>of</strong>twareS<strong>of</strong>tware ‘bug’A s<strong>of</strong>tware ‘bug’ is a flaw or mistake in a program that causes it to behave in a waythat was not intended by its designers. Such bugs only manifest themselves under aspecific set <strong>of</strong> circumstances that produce the same fault each time they occur.However, it may be extremely difficult to reproduce the program state that existedat the time a problem occurred because complex s<strong>of</strong>tware has a very large number<strong>of</strong> data items and functions, all <strong>of</strong> which interact with each other and most <strong>of</strong> whichare time-dependent.Overall, if the failure mode was due to a s<strong>of</strong>tware bug, it would be expected that itwould not reoccur more than once on any given unit without also occurring onmany other units. This was not the case with the LTN-101 data-spike failure mode,where the problem occurred twice on one unit and only once on another unit out <strong>of</strong>more than 8,000 units in operation.S<strong>of</strong>tware corruptionThe LTN-101 ADIRU s<strong>of</strong>tware was stored in ROM. If s<strong>of</strong>tware corruption were tooccur in this type <strong>of</strong> memory, it would generally result in a hard fault because theerroneous s<strong>of</strong>tware would be loaded every time the unit was powered up, and thefault would be reproduced as soon as the corrupted instruction was executed.Nevertheless, s<strong>of</strong>tware corruption can sometimes affect a system’s behaviour in lessobvious ways, such as if the corruption occurred in a set <strong>of</strong> instructions that wereonly executed on rare occasions. <strong>In</strong> such cases the problem would only reoccurwhen those instructions were executed. As discussed in section 1.16.2, there was- 135 -

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