Rapid transient fault insertion in large digital systems

This paper presents a technique for rapid transient fault injection, regarding the CPU time, to perform simulation-based fault-injection in complex System-on-Chip Systems (SoCs). The proposed approach can be applied to complex circuits, as it is not required to modify the top-level modules of a design; moreover, it is capable to inject a wide range of fault models in a design and finally a competitive reduction in terms of CPU time will be achieved. The root of our method is based on the usage of simulator-commands along with partial code modification techniques. To prove the efficiency of the proposed method, it has been implemented on two case studies, a pre-synthesized netlist of an AVR microcontroller from ATMEL and a post placed-and-routed Verilog netlist of a high performance reconfigurable processor in 90-nm UMC technology, Xentium processor from Recore Systems. Experimental results show that our technique is able to reduce the CPU time by a factor ranging from 27% to 67% compared with typical simulation-based fault-injection approaches and by a factor of 10% compared with rapid simulation-based techniques.