POWER-MODES

Abstract

Innovation cycles have been shortening significantly during the last years. This process puts tremendous pressure on designers of embedded systems for security-or reliability-critical applications. Eventual design problems not detected during design time can lead to lost money, confidentiality, or even loss of life in extreme cases. Therefore it is of vital importance to evaluate a new system for its robustness against intentionally and random induced operational faults. Currently this is generally done using extensive simulation runs using gate-level models or direct measurements on the finished silicon product. These approaches either need a significant amount of time and computational power for these simulations or rely on existing product samples. This article presents a novel system evaluation platform using power emulation and fault injection techniques to provide an additional tool for developers of embedded systems in security-and reliability-critical fields. Faults are emulated using state-of-the-art fault injection methods and a flexible pattern representation approach. The resulting effects of these faults on the power consumption profile are estimated using state-of-the-art power emulation hardware. A modular system augmentation approach provides emulation flexibility similar to fault simulation implementations. The platform enables the efficient evaluation of new hardware or software implementations of critical security or reliability solutions at an early development phase.