Non-intrusive Fault Injection Techniques for Efficient Soft Error Vulnerability Analysis

Abstract

Electronic computing systems are integrating modern multicore processors and GPUs aiming to perform complex software stacks in different life-critical systems, including health devices and emerging self-driving cars. Such systems are expected to experience at least one soft error per day in the near future [1], which may lead to life-threatening failures. This paper presents four novel non-intrusive fault injection techniques that enable full fault injection control and inspection of multicore systems behavior in the presence of faults. Proposed techniques were integrated into a fault injection framework and verified through a real automotive case study with up to 43 billions instructions. Results show that isolating critical application functions can lead to a more efficient soft error analysis with a reduction of masked faults in up to 28%.