FuSE - a hardware accelerated HDL fault injection tool

Abstract

The ongoing miniaturization of digital circuits makes them more and more susceptible to faults which also complicates the design of fault tolerant systems. In this context fault injection plays an important role in the process of fault tolerance validation. As a result many fault injection tools have emerged during the last decade. However these tools only operate on specific domains and can therefore be referred to as hardware- or software-, simulation- or emulation based techniques. In this paper we present FuSE, a single fault injection tool which covers multiple domains as well as different fault injection purposes. FuSE has been designed for usage with the SEmulator® - an FPGA-based hardware accelerator. The created tool set has been fully automated for the fault injection process and only requires a VHDL description and a testbench of the circuit under test. FuSE can then perform fault injection experiments with a diagnostic resolution that is known from simulation-based approaches, but at a speed that even handles long running experiments with ease.