Future high-performance safety-relevant applications require microcontrollers delivering higher performance than the existing certified ones. However, means for assessing their dependability are needed so that they can be certified against safety critical certification standars (e.g ISO26262). Dependability assessment analyses performed at high level of abstraction inject single faults to investigate the effects these have in the system. In this work we show that single faults do not comprise the whole picture, due to fault multiplicities and reactivations. Later we prove that, by injecting complex fault models that consider multiplicities and reactivations in higher levels of abstraction, results are substantially different, thus indicating that a change in the methodology is needed.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain under contract TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Carles Hern´andez is jointly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and FEDER funds through grant TIN2014-60404-JIN. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717.