Embedded System Paranoia: a tool for testing embedded system arithmetic

The quality of arithmetic implementation is of concern to all who work with or depend on the results of numerical computations. Embedded systems have become enormously complicated and widespread in most if not all consumer devices in recent years so there is a clear need to measure the quality of the arithmetic in the same way that conventional systems have been measured for some time using programs such as the well-known paranoia. A new version of paranoia has been introduced specifically to extend the domain of testable systems to embedded control systems. This paper describes the development of ESP (Embedded System Paranoia) and gives example outputs and free download sites. The example outputs indicate that even today, the quality of arithmetic implementations cannot be taken for granted with numerous implementation problems being reported in those embedded environments tried so far.