Injecting faults to succeed. Verification of the boot software on-board solar orbiter's energetic particle detector

•The Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) is part of the Solar Orbiter ESA mission.•EPD's Instrument Control Unit (ICU) software has strong fault tolerance requirements.•ICU's boot software development and testing begun before real hardware was available.•A SystemC/TLM2 fault-injection hardware simulator is included in the design cycle.•First usage of the virtual platform and early results are presented.

It is said that even the longest journey begins with the first step. This is also true for application software. When the power is switched on, computer systems execute an initial set of operations that usually perform memory tests and load the final runtime environment. This paper describes the Single Event Effects (SEEs) requirements verification of the boot software that will run in the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) of the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) on-board Solar Orbiter. Since in the booting stage there are no software services at all, it is difficult to achieve a complete software verification on real hardware. To shortcut this issue the Space Research Group (SRG) of the University of Alcalá has developed a LEON2 Virtual Platform (Leon2ViP) based on SystemC with fault injection capabilities. This way it is possible to run the exact same target binary software as if were run on the physical system, but in a controlled and deterministic environment, thus allowing a stricter requirements verification. The use of Leon2ViP has meant a significant improvement, in both time and cost, in the development and verification processes of the ICU's boot software.