Accelerating Transient Fault Injection Campaigns by using Dynamic HDL Slicing

Abstract

Along with the complexity of electronic systems for safety-critical applications, the cost of safety mechanisms evaluation by fault injection simulation is rapidly going up. To reduce these efforts, we propose a fault injection methodology where Hardware Description Language (HDL) code slicing is exploited to accelerate transient fault injection campaigns by pruning fault lists and reducing the number of the injections. In particular, the dynamic HDL slicing technique provides for a critical fault list and allows avoiding injections at non-critical time-steps. Experimental results on an industrial core show that the proposed methodology can successfully reduce the number of injections by up to 10 percent and speed-up the fault injection campaigns.

Representing Gate-Level SET Faults by Multiple SEU Faults at RTL

“…In the fault injection procedure, SEUs are injected in all possible locations and at each clock cycle [18]. Therefore, the number of injections required for a single transient fault is large, especially for the industrial-sized designs.…”