A soft fault is best described as:

• A. Transient and recoverable.
• B. Permanent and requires replacement.
• C. A fault that occurs only in software.
• D. A mechanism to bypass the fault.

Answer: (A)

Soft faults are transient, recoverable faults that don’t indicate a permanent hardware failure. They often arise from temporary conditions like radiation-induced bit flips or brief power glitches. Because these faults can be corrected by mechanisms such as error-correcting codes (ECC), memory scrubbing, or a simple reset, the system can return to normal operation without hardware replacement. If a fault remains after retries or corrections, that would be a hard fault requiring repair or replacement. A fault occurring only in software isn’t the defining feature of a soft fault, and bypassing a fault describes a mitigation method rather than the fault type itself.