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A fast, flexible, and easy-to-develop FPGA-based fault injection technique

Ebrahimi, M ; Sharif University of Technology

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  1. Type of Document: Article
  2. DOI: 10.1016/j.microrel.2014.01.002
  3. Abstract:
  4. By technology down scaling in nowadays digital circuits, their sensitivity to radiation effects increases, making the occurrence of soft errors more probable. As a consequence, soft error rate estimation of complex circuits such as processors is becoming an important issue in safety- and mission-critical applications. Fault injection is a well-known and widely used approach for soft error rate estimation. Development of previous FPGA-based fault injection techniques is very time consuming mainly because they do not adequately exploit supplementary FPGA tools. This paper proposes an easy-to-develop and flexible FPGA-based fault injection technique. This technique utilizes debugging facilities of Altera FPGAs in order to inject single event upset (SEU) and multiple bit upset (MBU) fault models in both flip-flops and memory units. As this technique uses FPGA built-in facilities, it imposes negligible performance and area overheads on the system. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is on average four orders of magnitude faster than a pure simulation-based fault injection. These features make the proposed technique applicable to industrial-scale circuits. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
  5. Keywords:
  6. Error correction ; Microprocessor chips ; Radiation hardening ; Complex circuits ; Fault Injection techniques ; Industrial-scale ; Mission critical applications ; Multiple bit upset ; Orders of magnitude ; Single event upsets ; Soft error rate estimations ; Computer control systems
  7. Source: Microelectronics Reliability ; Volume 54, Issue 5 , May , 2014 , Pages 1000-1008 ; ISSN: 00262714
  8. URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com./science/article/pii/S0026271414000067