Fault Injection Method Research Articles

HOPE: an efficient parallel fault simulator for synchronous sequential circuits

HOPE is an efficient parallel fault simulator for synchronous sequential circuits that employs the parallel version of the single fault propagation technique. HOPE is based on an earlier fault simulator railed PROOFS, which employs several heuristics to efficiently drop faults and to avoid simulation of many inactive faults. In this paper, we propose three new techniques that substantially speed up parallel fault simulation: (1) reduction of faults simulated in parallel through mapping nonstem faults to stem faults, (2) a new fault injection method called functional fault injection, and (3) a combination of a static fault ordering method and a dynamic fault ordering method. Based on our experiments, our fault simulator, HOPE, which incorporates the proposed techniques, is about 1.6 times faster than PROOFS for 16 benchmark circuits.

An Experiment in Applying a Fault Injection-Based Hazard Mitigation Technique to a Software Automobile Control System

Abstract This paper presents results from applying an empirical hazard mitigation technique (that assesses software fault-tolerance) to a software automobile control system. The technique is based on fault-injection methods that simulate the situation of hardware failures forcing the software to receive corrupt incoming signals. Once the software has been forced to receive corrupt data. the technique assesses the software's ability to not output hazardous states.

Focused fault injection testing of software implemented fault tolerance mechanisms of Voltan TMR nodes

One way of gaining confidence in the adequacy of fault tolerance mechanisms of a system is to test the system by injecting faults and see how the system performs under faulty conditions. This paper presents an application of the focused fault injection method that has been developed for testing software implemented fault tolerance mechanisms of distributed systems. The method exploits the object oriented approach of software implementation to support the injection of specific classes of faults. With the focused fault injection method, the system tester is able to inject specific classes of faults (including malicious ones) such that the fault tolerance mechanisms of a target system can be tested adequately. The method has been applied to test the design and implementation of voting, clock synchronization, and ordering modules of the Voltan TMR (triple modular redundant) node. The tests performed uncovered three flaws in the system software.

Evaluating processor-behavior and three error-detection mechanisms using physical fault-injection

An approach for assessing the impact of physical injection of transient faults on processor execution is described and evaluated. The fault injection is based on two complementary methods using: (1) heavy-ion radiation; and (2) power supply disturbances. 12000 transient faults were injected into the target microprocessor, a Motorola MC6809E 8-bit CPU, running 3 different workloads. In the evaluation, the control-flow errors were distinguished from those that had no effect on the correct flow of control. The errors that led to wrong results are separated from those that did not affect the correct results. The errors that affected neither the correct control flow nor the correct results are specified. Effects of errors on the registers and signals of the processor are characterized, Workload dependency on error rates is demonstrated. Three error-detection mechanisms, (2 software-based mechanisms and 1 watchdog timer) were combined and used to characterize the detected and undetected errors. More than 87% of all errors and 93% of the control-flow errors could be detected. In a different test, the efficiency of an isolated watchdog timer was evaluated. The coverage of the isolated watchdog timer was only 62%. The results indicate that fault-injection methods, workloads, and programming languages all differently affect the control flow, coverage, latency, and error rates. >