Abstract: Software faults have become one of the main causes of the failure of aerospace systems. Bugs in source code are still one of the most prominent kinds of problems in aerospace embedded software, such as array out of bounds, arithmetic overflow, divided by zero, data race, etc. Static analysis, which can infer runtime properties of a program at compile time through analyzing its source code, is an important technique to improve safety and reliability of aerospace embedded software. The code features and common kinds of program errors in aerospace embedded software are reviewed in this paper. After that, the static analysis techniques that are fit for analyzing aerospace embedded software are presented, including abstract interpretation, symbolic execution, data race detecting, etc. Then, some recent advance on applying static analysis techniques to aerospace embedded software in China are reviewed. Finally, some future directions on this topic are discussed.

Key words: embedded software, program analysis, static analysis, defect detection