Fault Injection for Test-Driven Development of Robust SoC Firmware

Abstract

Robustness against errors in hardware must be considered from the very beginning of safety-critical system-on-chip firmware design. Therefore, we present fault injection for test-driven development (TDD) of robust firmware. As TDD is based on instant feedback to the designer, fault injection must execute within few minutes. In contrast to state-of-the-art approaches, we avoid long simulation scenarios and runtimes by injecting faults at the unit level and utilizing host-compiled simulation. Further, three static bit-level analyses of firmware source code and hardware specification reduce the fault set significantly. This accelerates fault injection by several orders of magnitude and enables robustness-aware TDD.