1. A method for analyzing the fault tolerance (FT) capability of a system, the method comprising: recording, on tangible media that is accessible by a host machine, a set of calibrated FT requirements that must be satisfied by the system; using the host machine to generate an operations-level model of the system, wherein the operations-level model includes a mathematical model of the dynamics of the system and control logic for the system in the form of software operations, wherein each of the software operations includes input ports for receiving input signals and output ports for transmitting output signals; introducing a set of signal errors to the model in the form of at least one of a noise error, a trajectory shift error, a spike error, and a time-line distortion error; automatically characterizing a behavior of a set of components of the system, as represented by the model, as a discrete lookup table (LUT), wherein the LUT codifies the quality degradation of the input and output signals; and using the host machine to analyze the FT capability of the system via the discrete LUT with respect to the calibrated FT requirements from the functional specification.