There are many applications in which the reliability of the overall system mustbe far higher than the reliability of its individual components. In such casesdes... » 

There are many applications in which the reliability of the overall system mustbe far higher than the reliability of its individual components. In such casesdesigners devise mechanisms and architectures that allow the system to eithercompletely mask the effects of a component failure or recover from it soquickly that the application is not seriously affected. This is the work offaulttolerant designers and their work is increasingly important and complexnot only because of the increasing number of mission critical applicationsbut also because the diminishing reliability of hardware means that evensystems for noncritical applications will need to be designed with faulttolerance in mind. «