A Multicore Fault Injection Framework for Soft Errors on DSP

Abstract

In the field of space computing, DSP is more and more used for its high performance. Like other non-radiation-resistant chips, COTS DSP is easily affected by high-energy particle irradiation in the space environment, which can prone to transient faults, also known as soft errors. Soft error is one of the serious problems to the reliability of space computing. To evaluate the reliability of the software system based on COTS DSP, we designed MDSPFI, a new Fault Injection (FI) framework based on DSP C6678. As an emulation-based FI framework, MDSPFI is much more efficient in performance than pure SWIFI, and has higher controllability than pure hardware implemented FI tools. We designed FI script as autonomous emulation, thus, avoiding the intensive communication between the host and the emulation platform. Moreover, we accelerate the average per-experiment runtime by running on hardware emulator as well as conducting multithreaded execution with the multicore architecture, and reduces the FI experiment count by adopting the Fault pruning techniques. Experimental results show that MDSPFI has fairly well correctness and effectiveness.