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To: Nanchate who wrote (25626)	12/16/1998 3:51:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 31646

From R. Martin's site: ' The below is a very informative overview of the Y2K embedded systems problem and how serious it is from the perspective of a director of R&D of a firm working with power plants to remediate their embedded systems. Also hidden in this article is a revelation that they too have a hardware diagnostic tool to assist in remediating embedded systems -- see this paragraph: "Applied Microsystems has been asked to help in these phases of the year-2000 remediation. To assist in mapping the flow of date information through the systems we have invented a device that can identify certain types of date information in serial data transmissions. Since serial communications is the most common form of interconnecting embedded devices, this tool may help year-2000 remediation teams identify critical areas for further investigation as well as areas where no date information is used and can be ignored, thus saving valuable time." Excerpts follow -- see the whole link for the lengthy, excellent article. -Roleigh ----------------------------------------------------------------- techweb.com EE Times December 14, 1998, Issue: 1039 Section: Embedded Systems -- Focus: Reliability And The Year 2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------- The end user's take on the Y2K challenge Arnold S. Berger, Director of R&D, Applied Microsystems Corp., Redmond, Wash. [snip] Applied Microsystems Corp. got involved in year 2000 when it was contacted by one of these end users, an electric power utility. When asked to help work through the utility's year-2000 remediation efforts, my reaction was, at first, similar to that of most other experts: There's no problem. However, I was open-minded enough to visit the companies and discuss it from their perspective. For example, suppose that you are the power company for a large population area in a northern climate. You know the consequences to public health and safety if electrical power goes off in January when the outside temperature can go well below zero. Your capital assets include fossil-fuel generating plants as well as distribution facilities. You've done an inventory and you have identified about 14,000 embedded systems. How do you: - Decide, device by device, what is or isn't year-2000 compliant? - Assess if a failure will occur on 1/1/00 within a network of interconnected devices? - Test your systems for compliance without stopping the flow of power to your customers? - Keep the power flowing to your grid even if your large customers are causing major disruptions due to their own problems? - Protect yourself from legal liability if major disruptions do occur? These are the questions for the year-2000 team at just one utility. Multiply this by the number of power-generating operations in North America and the number of transmission and distribution operations and you begin to see the magnitude of the problem that they are facing-and this is just the power industry. Now consider the pipelines, the hospitals and the transportation systems. Essentially, the prognostications of the experts are meaningless for these people. They must test their systems if they are to survive. The year-2000 problem can be viewed in several ways. In a simplified description, it can exist because one or more computer systems-embedded or not-do one of the following: - Miscalculate a time span. - Advance from a correct date and time to an incorrect date and time. - Act incorrectly because of a misinterpretation of a date. - Cause other systems to act erroneously because of a locally generated date or time error. [snip] Perhaps the most troublesome of these date miscalculations are those involving calculations of time spans, although any erroneous date event can be serious. Typically, control systems depend upon derivatives to get rates and integrals to get totals, average values and trends. If a local data logger miscalculates a time span and that time span is used as a multiplier or a divisor in a process, then bad things can occur. Another failure mechanism is a miscalculated time synchronization. Distributed embedded systems often depend upon receiving a time stamp from a central location. If a local rollover occurs incorrectly, then one device may think it is Jan. 1, 2000 and another thinks it's Jan. 1, 1980. This will cause a central supervisory computer to shut the system down because of the fault condition-a minor inconvenience; bring it up again and synchronize the clocks. But the problem is that it won't come up and run because the date rollover will continue to cause errors. Every device in the system is operating the way it was designed to operate. All of the software is operating correctly. As long as the synchronization is off, the system will shut down. Another scenario: You have a process control sensor, like a pressure transducer or a flow meter. Since it contains an embedded processor with flash memory, it can store information about your process parameters, such as calibration factors, spans, units and calibration dates. Even though you checked the manufacturer's Web site and found that this device does not manipulate dates, you have a possible problem. Suppose that the technician who last calibrated it stored a date of 3/5/99 in its calibration memory. The supervisory computer periodically checks the health and calibration dates of the devices it monitors. Suppose on 1/1/00 this device reports back 3/5/99 and the supervisory computer calculates that the device was last calibrated-99 years ago! It is out of calibration and the process must be shut down. Let us say that this isn't an embedded system problem but the fault of the control algorithm in the supervisory computer. But this computer system may itself be an embedded system within a larger network. It was purchased as an integrated control system and all the operating software and firmware is invisible to the end user. The system integrators, the original developers of the device, either no longer support it or are no longer around. To the end user, this whole thing is an embedded system. It is not just the valve, the process controller or the supervisory computer: It is an integrated system of devices. [snip] Applied Microsystems has been asked to help in these phases of the year-2000 remediation. To assist in mapping the flow of date information through the systems we have invented a device that can identify certain types of date information in serial data transmissions. Since serial communications is the most common form of interconnecting embedded devices, this tool may help year-2000 remediation teams identify critical areas for further investigation as well as areas where no date information is used and can be ignored, thus saving valuable time. Although much of the in-depth system testing is just beginning, there have been several reports of significant date errors found and corrected. Some of the test results would have been very serious if they had occurred during normal plant operation. It is hoped that this will serve as a wake-up call to those who operate their facilities and as a sobering reminder to the experts who believe the problems are trivial and the severity blown out of proportion to the actual danger.