Fast and Accurate Model-Driven FPGA-based System-Level Fault Emulation

Abstract

Safety-critical designs need to ensure reliable operations even under a hostile working environment with a certain degree of confidence. Continuous technology scaling has resulted in designs being more susceptible to the risk of failure. As a result, the safety requirements are constantly evolving and becoming more stringent. For validating and measuring the robustness of safety-critical designs, fault injection methods are employed within the design flows. To ensure safety requirements’ compliance, and at the same time to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of modern SoCs, the existing design flows become inadequate as the process is repetitive, time-tedious, and requires high manual efforts. In this paper, a fully automated, fast and accurate, fault emulation framework based on the FPGA platform is proposed that enables a high level of controllability and observability for fault injection. The approach uses model-driven engineering concepts and automates various fault injection campaigns, namely, statistical fault injection (SFI), direct fault injection (DFI), and exhaustive fault injection (EFI). A novel design architecture tailored for the FPGA platform is also proposed to improve the overall productivity of performing fault emulation. The proposed approach scales to a wide variety of RISC-V based CPU subsystems with varying complexity in size and features. The experimental results demonstrate a significant gain in the fault emulation performance by a factor of 2.75x to 47.57x when compared to the standard simulation-based fault injection methods.