Only 10 Days to Shipping … We May Have a Memory Problem!

How many times have you been in a situation working with a new system where the board bring-up occurred without any major problems manifesting themselves (hey, it could happen)? Initially, everything seems to work just fine. The rudimentary diagnostic tests provided by the hardware guys indicate that all is as it should be. The application software appears to be working as planned. The customer ship date is fast approaching. Everyone on the team is starting to feel confident… but suddenly… with only a few days to go… everything grinds to a halt. Possibly an application is attempting some new task for the first time – perhaps a DMA transfer with the CPU cache disabled. But why is the system crashing? Surely someone must have validated this mode of operation… didn’t they?