Fault injection acceleration by simultaneous injection of non-interacting faults

Fault injection is the de facto standard for evaluating the sensitivity of digital systems to transient errors. Due to various masking effects only a very small portion of the injected faults lead to system-level failures, and hence, too many faults have to be injected for achieving statistically meaningful results. At the same time, since the majority of injected faults will be masked, lots of simulation cycles will be wasted for tracking each and every injected fault separately. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic acceleration technique which evaluates the impact of multiple non-interacting faults in one workload execution. In case no failure is observed, this technique skips the evaluation of those individual faults which leads to a significant speedup. The experimental results on the Leon3 processor show that our proposed technique shortens the fault injection runtime by two orders of magnitude.

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